Facebook Messenger will now give you the chance to remove your messages from a recipient’s inbox, with its new Unsend feature. Let’s say that you sent a bad pun to your work group chat: that joke that was funny in your head, but your sense of humor is so twisted that your coworkers don’t appreciate it at all. Facebook Messenger now gives you the power to preserve your honor and prevent you from being branded as the office weirdo.
Long-pressing a message will prompt a couple of choices, including ‘remove’. The users may then choose to “unsend” the message for everyone or for themselves only. You can long-press a message and it prompts a couple of actions you want to take, including ‘remove’.
However, messages can only be unsent within the first 10 minutes of sending and a marker will be left where the deleted message was. Facebook will also keep a copy of any unsent messages, to protect users in case of policy violations.
Facebook is also planning more unsend features including expiration dates for unencrypted messages or conversation threads. It would be helpful for users to keep control of their data.
This feature is now available in a handful of countries and would hopefully be ready for the whole world soon.
