Facebook’s Unsend Feature Now Rolling Out To Messenger App

Facebook Messenger is now allowing users to delete messages they’ve sent to the recipient’s inbox. The new unsend feature in Facebook Messenger is now rolling out to users in Poland, Bolivia, Colombia and Lithuania.

The new unsend feature, which is officially called “Remove for Everyone,” is baked right into the Facebook Messenger app. Users will be able to unsend a message by tapping and holding on the message and clicking on the “Remove” button.

Pressing the “Remove” button will bring up two options: “Remove for Everyone” and “Remove for You.” Selecting the former will retract the message entirely, while the latter will simply remove the message from the user’s own thread but will remain in the recipient’s inbox, according to TechCrunch.

When a user decides to remove a message, a pop-up will inform the user that “You’ll permanently remove this message for all chat members. They can see that you removed a message and still report it.” When a message is removed, it will be replaced by an indicator, known as a “tombstone,” to explicitly show that a message has been removed from the conversation.

Messages can only be unsent for the first 10 minutes after they’ve been delivered. This should provide users with more than enough time to correct a mistake or remove a message that was not supposed to be sent to a certain person. When a user deletes a message sent by a friend, it will only be removed from the user’s own inbox.

Users will still be able to report deleted messages for abuse or other issues by tapping on the person’s name and tapping “Something’s Wrong.” Facebook also has a private copy of the message that has been deleted, so that it will still be able to review it for abuse or harassment. Nevertheless, Facebook will only keep a copy of the message for a short period of time.

“The pros are that users want to be in control . . . and if you make a mistake you can correct it. There are a lot of legitimate use cases out there that we wanted to enable,” Facebook’s head of Messenger Stan Chudnovsky told TechCrunch. “We need to make sure we don’t open up any new venues for bullying. We need to make sure people aren’t sending you bad messages and then removing them because if you report them and the messages aren’t there we can’t do anything.”

A Facebook spokesperson said that this new unsend feature will be available globally “as soon as possible.” Facebook is also planning to launch more unsend feature to Messenger in the future. Some of the other unsend features that Facebook is working on include expiration dates for unencrypted messages and or entire conversations, according to Engadget.