Take That, Facebook! You Can’t Have My Content!

Jan 31, 2025 | Learning, Social Media

I mentioned a few times that I have deleted nearly 15 years of my posts on Facebook. A few friends asked me “How did you do that?” because the obvious answer would have been to delete my Facebook account entirely and leave it vulnerable to being hijacked by spammers and scammers and other miscreants that are so numerous on that, and other social media platforms.

The slightly better answer, in short? It’s easy, but it is tedious and time-consuming. It’s something to do while you’re watching TV. Better than doomscrolling the moment you wake up. Probably not as effective as you might hope in preventing content misuse by Meta, since they don’t actually promise to honor your deletion request immediately, or after the 30-day “don’t you want to change your mind” period ends, or after the additional 90-day “we’ll get around to it if we feel like it” ends.

Here are the relevant portions of Meta’s Terms of Service as they stand today, 1/31/2025:

2. Permission to use content you create and share: Specifically, when you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights on or in connection with our Products, you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, and worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings). This means, for example, that if you share a photo on Facebook, you give us permission to store, copy, and share it with others (again, consistent with your settings) such as Meta Products or service providers that support those products and services. This license will end when your content is deleted from our systems.
3. Deleting Your Content: You can delete individual content you share, post, and upload at any time. In addition, all content posted to your personal account will be deleted if you delete your account. Learn more about how to delete your account. Account deletion does not automatically delete content that you post as an admin of a page or content that you create collectively with other users, such as photos in Shared Albums which may continue to be visible to other album members.
It may take up to 90 days to delete content after we begin the account deletion process or receive a content deletion request. If you send content to trash, the deletion process will automatically begin in 30 days unless you chose to delete the content sooner. While the deletion process for such content is being undertaken, the content is no longer visible to other users. After the content is deleted, it may take us up to another 90 days to remove it from backups and disaster recovery systems.
Content will not be deleted within 90 days of the account deletion or content deletion process beginning in the following situations:
  • where your content has been used by others in accordance with this license and they have not deleted it (in which case this license will continue to apply until that content is deleted);
  • where deletion within 90 days is not possible due to technical limitations of our systems, in which case, we will complete the deletion as soon as technically feasible; or
  • where immediate deletion would restrict our ability to:
    • investigate or identify illegal activity or violations of our terms and policies (for example, to identify or investigate misuse of our Products or systems);
    • protect the safety, integrity, and security of our Products, systems, services, our employees, and users, and to defend ourselves;
    • comply with legal obligations for the preservation of evidence, including data Meta Companies providing financial products and services preserve to comply with any record keeping obligations required by law; or
    • comply with a request of a judicial or administrative authority, law enforcement or a government agency;
in which case, the content will be retained for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which it has been retained (the exact duration will vary on a case-by-case basis).
In each of the above cases, this license will continue until the content has been fully deleted.
4. Permission to use your name, profile picture, and information about your actions with ads and sponsored or commercial content: You give us permission to use your name and profile picture and information about actions you have taken on Facebook next to or in connection with ads, offers, and other sponsored or commercial content that we display across our Products, without any compensation to you. For example, we may show your friends that you are interested in an advertised event or have liked a Facebook Page created by a brand that has paid us to display its ads on Facebook. Ads and content like this can be seen only by people who have your permission to see the actions you’ve taken on Meta Products. You can learn more about your ad settings and preferences.

Got all that? So, on the one hand, when you send some piece of content to the Trash bin on Meta, that should start the clock. You can choose to retrieve that content from Trash at any time during the 30 days unless you empty the Trash itself. (Windows users should recognize this as similar to the Recycle bin.) That’s all well and good, but then Meta claims an additional 90-day period during which they’ll start the actual deletion if and when they get around to it. We’re up to 120 days, now, for those of you who are counting. During this time – and possibly forever – you will see things pop up in Memories that shouldn’t be there anymore, putting into question whether Facebook honors its own TOS or not. (It’s a rhetorical question.) Note the weasel words: “where deletion within 90 days is not possible due to technical limitations of our systems, in which case, we will complete the deletion as soon as technically feasible” and the claim of license in perpetuity. Till we get around to it, basically.< /br>< /br>

But it made me feel better to do it. They may already have used my content to train AI. They may keep my content haunting their servers until the sheer weight of their data center causes a sinkhole. I don’t advise bothering with this unless you’re just incredibly bored and need to do something with your hands. But here’s how, if it makes you feel any better.

  1. Request a backup of all your Facebook data.
  2. Wait until you are notified by Facebook that your backup is ready for download (this usually takes a few days – they are incredibly slow – you’d think hamsters actually ran the servers or something). They will email you a link.
  3. Download all your data, then open or extract the backup to see what is and what is not in it. You will not receive your friends’ contact information for privacy reasons.
  4. Now, go to Settings & Privacy > Activity Log.Facebook Activity log dialog box.
  5. From Filters, choose a Date range. (Or don’t – I did not want to delete my most recent activity, so I started with the oldest years and worked forward to the most recent month.)
  6. Choose the type of content you want to delete (there is no nuclear option, here – you will have to do this bit by bit by tedious, boring bit). The screenshot only shows about half of the different things you’ll find under your Activity log. I started with Posts. After all, once a Post is deleted, all the conversation on it also disappears. This seemed the most efficient approach.
  7. Posts expands to show this:Facebook Activity log - Posts dialog box.
  8. Next, Select Your posts, photos, and videos. To the right, you should now see a list of posts within your selected date range with check boxes to their left. By default, Facebook will only show you 25 of them at a time. If you want to do this the SUPER tedious way, click All > Trash. After about 5 times of this, you discover exactly how much crap you’ve been posting on Facebook over the years and you will be tempted just to give up. That’s their hope, anyway. I can only assume that’s their hope, or surely Meta would’ve made bulk deletion easier by now. It’s better than LinkedIn, which doesn’t have any bulk deletion capability at all, other than “Delete my account.”LESS tedious method: Scroll down the page until you can see approximately 6-7 screens worth of posts. (The hard limit on this is 250, so if you select more than 250 at a time, you’ll get an error and have to start over again. Now that’s what I call the MOST tedious method!) Selecting All will only select what’s visible. If it says you’ve selected 251 or more posts, uncheck anything over 249. Why 249? Beats hell out of me. Leave 250 after you get the error saying you’ve exceeded the maximum number of posts you can delete, and you’re likely just to get the same error over again and have to start from scratch. This will make more sense the first time you do it. After the fourth or fifth time, the painfulness of it sinks in and you’re not likely to forget this tip.Select 250, Trash. Repeat. Ad nauseum. This could take weeks, if you’ve been on Facebook for more than a minute.

Now, just when you think you’ve got everything, wait a few days more. Go back and spot check by year. I can almost guarantee there will be undeleted posts still lurking there.

Explore all the other sections of this Activity log page. Then check out the section under Settings & Privacy called Content preferences.

Facebook Content preferences dialog box.

You may be surprised by what’s in there, and I can guarantee that deleting most of it will help to clean up your Facebook feed, at least till you gunk it all up again. And you will – never mind your best intentions – unless you delete your account or just refuse to log into it again.

Holly Jahangiri

Holly Jahangiri is the author of Trockle, illustrated by Jordan Vinyard; A Puppy, Not a Guppy, illustrated by Ryan Shaw; and the newest release: A New Leaf for Lyle, illustrated by Carrie Salazar. She draws inspiration from her family, from her own childhood adventures (some of which only happened in her overactive imagination), and from readers both young and young-at-heart. She lives in Houston, Texas, with her husband, J.J., whose love and encouragement make writing books twice the fun.

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