Archive: Facebook's 2014 Experiment With Disappearing Posts

From the TI archives — originally published September 2014.

Facebook was testing a Snapchat-like feature: the ability to schedule a post to expire. A handful of users spotted it in the Facebook iOS app in early September 2014, and when tech press reached out, a Facebook spokesperson confirmed it: "We're running a small pilot of a feature on Facebook for iOS that lets people schedule deletion of their posts in advance."

The test came with an asterisk that was already familiar. Even on Snapchat — the service built on the promise that chats disappear — deleted photos had turned out to be recoverable with forensic tools, as the company itself had acknowledged on its blog a year earlier. A 2013 analysis had shown that supposedly deleted snaps were merely pushed to an obscure corner of the device, retrievable by anyone who knew where to look. The "disappearing" was, at best, disappearance from view.

The 2014 take holds up: ephemeral features change the social contract of posting — people share more freely when they believe the evidence won't outlive the moment — but deletion from a profile has never meant deletion from a server, or from a screenshot. Facebook's pilot was a bid to make the platform feel lighter and more casual. The caution that followed was the durable part of the story.

So the advice, then and now: be careful about what you put out there. Deleted is a promise, not a guarantee.