After the events of the last few weeks, it has become impossible to trust Facebook as much anymore. That's why it's a good idea to learn how to do a little cleaning among your posted online activities.
The simple version of the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal is that the world's largest social network betrayed your trust and facilitated the hijacking of the United States election by sharing all your data with third parties. The same data has been used to serve you personalized ads and fake news to radicalize you and distort your view of political reality.
The "funny" part is that, in one sense, all these things happened with your consent. When you agreed to use Facebook and log in to various websites and online services with your Facebook account, everything you ever posted on your personal page, pages you liked, details about your religion, political affiliations, the list with your friends and more, all became public domain.
In theory, it shouldn't be that simple, and Mark Zuckerberg has made numerous promises in recent days that such scenarios will be much more difficult, if not impossible, in the future.
If, however, you don't trust Zuckerberg very much, and at the same time you don't want to give up Facebook completely, the solution involves cleaning up your old posts, posting as infrequently as possible, and hiding most of personal details.
So that no one finds out how old you are, where you are from, where you live and what football team you play with, it is enough to access your personal Facebook page from the mobile application or from the web and go to About or About.
Tap or click on any element in that list and, on the right side, you will have a button in the form of a pencil through which you can edit that data or change the people who have access to that information. The privacy part changes with a tap on the little globe.
How to delete old posts on Facebook
What you post on Facebook defines you as a person, whether it's a link to an article you like or a review of a restaurant you visited. Unfortunately, if you ever decide you want to delete everything you've posted on Facebook in the past year or five years ago, the process is incredibly laborious and involves deleting every single post.
No matter how you look at it, the current mechanism is meant to discourage you from mass deleting years of posts.
Fortunately, there is an alternative in the form of a Google Chrome extension. In other words, it only works on a laptop or desktop that you use Facebook on. On mobile, there is no alternative with a similar effect.
The extension I used this time is Social Book Post Manager and it can be downloaded for free from the Chrome WebStore. It doesn't even exist on Firefox or Safari. If this topic really stresses you out and you have a fundamental problem with Google's browser, temporarily install Chrome to solve the problem. After that, you can delete it.
After installation, go to your Facebook page and access the Activity Log or Activity Log in the beautiful Romanian language. It's a blue button to the right of the cover photo.
When you have the infinite list in front of your eyes, click on the blue button at the top right next to the address bar in Chrome. You will immediately see a window that provides you with a bunch of options.
If you want to delete your old Facebook posts, after calling the Social Book Post Manager, choose the year you want to delete. Possibly define the month you are interested in, if you want to be more selective.
Also for filtering, you can enter one or more words in the "Text Contains" area. Thus, only posts containing that text will be deleted. If you are convinced of your decision, you can uncheck Prescan On Page. If you don't do this, you'll see every post that's about to be deleted before it's gone forever.
At the end, press Delete, in the lower left corner of the new window.
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For reference, depending on the number of posts you had during the period you want deleted and the speed of your internet connection, the deletion process may take quite a while. Moreover, it may not be reflected in the disappearance of all posts from the first.
You don't have to worry. Repeat the deletion process with the same parameters, and in two or three tries you should have your count. In the end, it would have been ideal to be simpler than that, but it seems that, at least at the moment, it is not possible.
In any case, the parameters you can adjust in Social Book Post Manager help you be as precise as possible, a very important detail.