There are some things that really never needed to make the journey from thought to typed out message sent to an audience and lost into the cyberverse for all eternity.
Facebook has been sitting on the technology to allow you to ‘unsend’ a message for a long time, but it was a feature that only Mark Zuckerberg had the privilege to use.
Until now.
Yes, it’s finally happening: Facebook is letting you unsend any and all of the stupid s**t that you deemed appropriate to communicate via Facebook message.
Until now, you could delete messages only from your own inbox, but the unsend feature allows you to take back a message within 10 minutes of it being sent. So really try to think about that drunk text you’re sending for the 10 minutes following, because this is your window to redeem your judgement.
To use the feature, you open Facebook Messenger on your phone or desktop, go to the conversation and press and hold on the message you want to adios. You then select ‘delete’ at the bottom of the screen and select ‘remove for everyone’.
When you remove the message it’s replaced with text notifying the would-be recipients that something has been deleted from the chat. So you’ll still have to explain how you ended up in the DM’s of your ex and what not, but you can at least save face for the most part.
The deleted message will however remain on Facebook’s server for a limited time (apparently), in case it’s something abusive that might need to be reported.
But hopefully you’ll mostly just encounter the feature when you’re your messiest self and in need of a lifeline. Now if they could just add this unsend feature to texts now that would be great.