Facebook Now Lets Everyone Unsend Messages For 10 Minutes (techcrunch.com)

Facebook has finally made good on its promise to let users unsend chats after TechCrunch discovered Mark Zuckerberg had secretly retracted some of his Facebook Messages from recipients. From a report: Today Facebook Messenger globally rolls out "Remove for everyone" to help you pull back typos, poor choices, embarrassing thoughts, or any other message. For up to 10 minutes after sending a Facebook Message, the sender can tap on it and they'll find the delete button has been replaced by "Remove for you", but there's now also a "Remove for everyone" option that pulls the message from recipients' inboxes. They'll see an alert that you removed a message in its place, and can still flag the message to Facebook who'll retain the content briefly to see if its reported.

The feature could make people more comfortable having honest conversations or using Messenger for flirting since they can second guess what they send, but it won't let people change ancient history. The company abused its power by altering the history of Zuckerberg's Facebook's messages in a way that email or other communication mediums wouldn't allow.

Comments

Different set of problems arise

[Maelwryth]

A problem with recindable messages is that someone can post something threatening or false and then remove it after the person or people had seen it. Facebook can remove it, your brain can't. This will probably lead to a whole new set of problems.

Re:Maybe it's me ...

[DickBreath]

10 minutes is enough time to light a forest fire of Fake News. And then un-light it back at the source. Meanwhile the forest continues to burn.

Are you sure you want to Change History Comrade?

[goombah99]

[Da] or [Nyet]

I don't think this puts in a delay. I think it lets you retract it. The end user could screen shot it, but the official message is deleted.