Facebook May Soon Allow Posts To Disappear Like Insta Stories But Only After A Few Years
Mark Zuckerberg hopes that such a feature will give users the comfort to share more naturally.
By Alyssa J. Oon — 19 Mar 2019, 10:54 AM
Facebook has faced a string of scandals in the year, from the Cambridge Analytica revelation to a massive security breach that affected over 50 million of its users
In a 3,200-word blog post that went up on 7 March, Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg outlined six principles the social network giant will follow in order to build a "privacy-focused platform".
"I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won't stick around forever," he wrote.
"This is the future I hope we will help bring about."
One of the principles outlined by Zuckerberg was to "reduce permanence" by implementing a feature that would make messages or posts expire after some time
The feature would automatically delete messages after a month or a year by default, to save the user from their post potentially resurfacing and embarrassing them later on in life.
"Stories already expire after 24 hours unless you archive them, and that gives people the comfort to share more naturally. This philosophy could be extended to all private content."
However, the tech giant understands that platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have become a place for many people to record their lives
"[I]f all posts on Facebook and Instagram disappeared, people would lose access to a lot of valuable knowledge and experiences others have shared," said the Facebook co-founder.
He added that users will have the ability to change the timeframe or turn off auto-deletion for their threads, if they'd like to do so.
An option for users to set individual messages to expire after a few seconds or minutes will also be provided.
Read the full blog post here.