People who’d corresponded with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg contacted Techcrunch to say that Zuck’s messages were missing from their inboxes — but the replies to his messages lived on as proof that something had been deleted.
Facebook confirmed that starting in 2014, Facebook began covertly deleting the personal messages Zuckerberg had sent to Facebook users, allegedly in response to the hacking of Sony Pictures.
Within hours of Techcrunch’s story, Facebook announced that it would extend this feature to other Facebook users.
Even as Facebook was ensuring that its CEO could sanitize his public records, it was deceiving its users by claiming that when they deleted the private videos they’d uploaded, the videos would disappear — instead, Facebook permanently retained these videos.
Facebook now says that it plans to launch an “unsend” feature for Facebook messages to all users in the next several months, and won’t let Mark Zuckerberg use that feature any more until it launches for everyone. One option Facebook is considering for the Unsend feature is an expiration timer users could set. But it’s alarming that Facebook didn’t disclose the retractions or plans for a Unsend button until forced, and scrambling to give everyone the feature seems like an effort to quiet users’ anger over the situation
Facebook retracted Zuckerberg’s messages from recipients’ inboxes [Josh Constine/Techcrunch]