Perfectionists rejoice! Facebook has just announced that you will be able to unsend messages sent in Facebook Messenger.
Available on the latest version of Messenger for both iOS and Android, the feature allows you to delete any sent message within ten minutes of sending. Perfect for those awkward typos or second guesses.
Users have been calling for an unsend feature for a while – especially after it was revealed that Facebook executives already had the capability.
Facebook’s head of Messenger, Stan Chudnovsky, stated:
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. [However] 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…
The question becomes “who owns that message?” Before that message is delivered to your Messenger app, it belongs to me. But when it actually arrives, it probably belongs to both of us.
In order to safeguard against cases like Chudnovsky mentioned, Facebook put the ten minute limit in place. Hopefully, the limit will keep the new feature from enabling cyberbullies by not allowing them to delete harmful messages days after sending.