Facebook Messenger’s delete option kicks in

Facebook is letting people delete their messenges, but you may not have access to the feature just yet.

The Remove feature rolled out Thursday in Poland, Bolivia, Colombia and Lithuania on Facebook Messenger for iOS and Android, according to TechCrunch, which explained how the new feature works.

We already knew you’d be able to delete sent messages within 10 minutes, but TechCrunch reported that it will leave a marker so people know where the message had been.

To use it, you tap and hold on a sent message, then hit “Remove.” This gives you the option to “Remove for Everyone,” completely retracting the message and leaving a marker, or “Remove for you,” which lets the recipients continue to see the message (like the current delete option).

“You’ll permanently remove this message for all chat members. They can see that you removed a message and still report it,” the final warning notes when you select “Remove for Everyone.”

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The social network will also hang onto any unsent messages for a short time, so they can be reviewed for policy violations if they’re reported and people engaged in harbadment won’t be able to use the feature to hide their actions.

The company is looking into expanding the Remove feature to let you preemptively set expiration dates for individual messages or entire threads.

Stan Chudnovsky, who heads Facebook Messenger, told TechCrunch that the Remove feature isn’t same one used to delete messages from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, so he couldn’t say if Facebook’s security teams would leave the same deletion note when its executives’ messages are removed.

Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg were the subjects of a New York Times report on Wednesday about their handling of the scandals that have rocked the company in recent years.

Facebook didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the Remove feature’s global rollout, but TechCrunch reported that the company is aiming to make it widely available “as soon as possible.”

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