Facebook has been making mistakes and deepening troubles for itself after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Things took an even harsher turn when Facebook accepted to deleting Mark Zuckerberg’s messages which he sent to a lot of recipients. Now the company is claiming that it is ready to launch a new ‘Unsend’ feature which will allow users to unsend their messages. This is to be noted that Facebook has already been using a similar feature on their another platform Instagram where the feature has garnered immense popularity. They have also accepted that no further message from Mark Zuckerberg will be retracted from the recipient's inbox.
As per the report by TechCrunch, Facebook has strategically turned the ‘unsending’ incident by Mark Zuckerberg into a beta testing opportunity for the Messenger. The Facebook spokesperson who spoke at length about this new development added to his words "We have discussed this feature several times. And people using our secret message feature in the encrypted version of Messenger have the ability to set a timer - and have their messages automatically deleted. We will now be making a broader delete message feature available. This may take some time. And until this feature is ready, we will no longer be deleting any executives' messages. We should have done this sooner - and we're sorry that we did not.”
Interestingly Facebook currently offers a similar feature which is known as the Secret chat and assists users in sending self-destructing messages. The present feature offers the ability to destruct messages within 5 seconds or one day. The new feature which is being planned by Facebook will include the combination of a similar functionality and will be more on the lines of ‘Unsend’ feature.
The report by TechCrunch outlined "Facebook didn't have details about whether recipients would be notified when a message was unsent and retracted from their inboxes, whether the feature would apply retroactively to old messages sent before the launch or whether users would need to designate a message as expiring/unsendable before they send it." The spokesperson supported this claim by saying that the possible implementation of the feature would revolve around the existing self-destructing message functionality and would be in close proximity to the same in terms of development.
Like we mentioned before, this is not the first time that Facebook is implementing a feature like this, they have done a similar job on two of their platforms – WhatsApp and Instagram. While the WhatsApp allows the user to delete the message after a certain amount of time and replaces it with the text saying "Your message has been deleted", the Instagram application totally wipes the message from the chat screen from both the sender’s and receiver’s side. It remains to be seen how Facebook seeks to implement a similar feature on their prime platform.
