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Comment by thinkingemote

7 years ago

Just an anecdote. I had a day set aside to purging my Facebook entries a year or two back. I manually deleted comments and posts.

Of course there was too many to do and it was very boring so I only spent a couple of hours at it. But that's nots what's interesting. What happened was that I got a huge uptake of people commenting on some old post I made, like a profile picture change. I think Facebook saw I was purging my data slowly and reached out to my FB contacts encouraging them to interact more with me. It was very odd.

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thinkingemote

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dennisgorelik  7 years ago

You made changes to old post (deleted comments), so Facebook decided that because there are some updates to old posts - it makes sense to treat these old posts as new. So Facebook started to show these posts to your friends in their news feeds.

  • r00fus  7 years ago

    Isn't that against the goal of a deletion?

    FB should honor intentions and let deleted stuff not be flagged as "new".

    • dennisgorelik  7 years ago

      "What to show" prioritization should mostly focus on the interest a reader (not the writer).

      I, as a reader, want to see posts with recently deleted [or updated] comments.

mephitix  7 years ago

If you're worried about FB analyzing/selling your data then "deleting" does nothing. It effectively just sets a boolean flag on a record in a database which is more like 'hiding'.

It may not appear anymore in the frontend but you can be pretty sure it's still being used by FB. Now that may change after GDPR but who knows...

multibit  7 years ago

Is there not a way to delete all posts and comments at once?

  • adventured  7 years ago

    I don't believe so, at least not in the recent past. I purged my FB of all content about 18 months ago, and had to do it manually. Took several hours spread across a few weeks, whenever I could force myself to spend the time on it. For whatever reason I kept finding posts/comments for a few weeks after that; I'd go back to make sure I got everything, scouring the timelines, and there'd be something I missed somehow, quite bizarre.

  • sverige  7 years ago

    I've never had a Facebook account, but friends have told me that no, there is not. That would go against their user and content retention models, I'm sure. It makes sense that Facebook would make it as difficult, tedious, and painful as possible to delete content from their platform.