Almost a year after first announcing it, Facebook is now rolling out its 'unsend' message option in Messenger to all users, providing a way to retract previously sent Messenger communications within a 10-minute window.
The Unsend Message feature has started rolling out to both Android and iOS users in Poland, Bolivia, Colombia, and Lithuania. A Facebook spokesperson has confirmed that the worldwide roll out will also be happening “as soon as possible”.
The feature is called ‘Remove for Everyone’ and it will enable users to delete any message or file they have sent in Messenger. However, they will only be able to do it within 10 minutes of sending it.
Here are the steps to use the new ‘Remove for Everyone’ feature on Facebook:
- Long press on the message you want to recall.
- On doing this, two options will pop-up on the screen — ‘Remove for Everyone’ and Remove for You’.
- Select ‘Remove for Everyone’.
- Facebook will then prompt a warning message — ‘You’ll permanently remove this message for all chat members. They can see that you removed a message and still report it’. This will be coupled with ‘Cancel’ and ‘Remove’ options.
- Select Remove.
After this, your message will be replaced by a tombstone message saying ‘You removed a message’. This is similar to what happens on WhatsApp. However, you can only do it within 10 minutes of sending the message. And Facebook’s head of Messenger Stan Chudnovsky explained the deadline by saying, “We looked at how the existing delete functionality works. It turns out that when people are deleting messages because it’s a mistake or they sent something they didn’t want to send, it’s under a minute. We decided to extend it to 10, but decided we didn’t need to do more.”
If you want to remove a message just for yourself, you can still do that anytime by selecting “Remove for You”. When you choose this option, the message will be removed for you, but not for anybody else in the chat.