Comment by ridgeguy
7 years ago
Looking online briefly for definitions of "delete":
"remove or obliterate (written or printed matter), especially by drawing a line through it or marking it with a delete sign."
"synonyms: remove, cut out, take out, edit out, expunge, excise, eradicate, cancel"
All of these seem clearly "absolute" to me. "Delete" means it's gone.
I think Facebook has its own special linguistic distortion field. It requires no "dumb conspiracy theory" to realize that Facebook cannot be trusted.
Deletion by flag is very common in IT and presumably has been since the first undelete program was created. It's not a Facebook thing.
Some mail programs for a long time have had a soft-delete that requires an expunging process to create compete removal.
In an IT setting you can delete a blob from a db, but it might still be on disk, and it will still be in caches, on user machines, and in backups/archives.
Because FB deletes by flag so that content disappear instantly and then start the actual process of deletion (which can take while because of stuff like backup, cols storage)...