Kurt's Thoughts

Facebook is a giant time sink and while you rationalize using it for your “knitting group” or hitting up your old high school classmates, the fact is that none of that is actually that valuable.

Meanwhile, Facebook is using you by monetizing your privacy every second of your life through fairly devious means you’re probably not even aware of. For example, did you know that the Facebook Messenger app is collecting all of your SMS text messages and the phone numbers you call/receive on your cell phone? I’ll bet you never agreed to that, did you? Do a search on it. You can even download what they’ve collected from the main Facebook site. Facebook even admitted it.

Look. I get it. You can’t get rid of your Facebook account because you have memberships to X or you get group meeting noticed from Y. Whatever. You need to maintain your memberships & your friends.

What you can do is DELETE EVERYTHING FROM YOUR ACCOUNT. Removing this content eliminates your presence on Facebook, minimizes your digital footprint, and kills Facebook’s ability to monetize your life.

HOW TO DELETE EVERYTHING IN YOUR FACEBOOK ACCOUNT
I deleted 12 years of posts, photos, comments, likes, etc. from my Facebook account. You can too. All you need is Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome.

• Install the “Social Book Post Manager”.
  This is a free installable extension for your web browser that will, like a robot, “batch delete” content in your Facebook account. It is not fast as it emulates a human’s interactions with the Facebook web site so if you have a lot of posts or have many years of content you wish to delete, you may want to install & run it on more than one computer.
  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/social-book-post-manager/ljfidlkcmdmmibngdfikhffffdmphjae
• Login to Facebook and go to the Activity Log.
  Login to Facebook (TM), go to the Activity Log.
  Use activity filters to select a subset of posts to delete.
• Run Social Book Post Manager & configure what posts/content to remove.
  It allows you to select what timeframe & context you want to remove content from (ex: 2015-2018 & anything with the word “Trump” in it), what content you want to delete (ex: posts, comments, likes, etc.) and how you want it deleted (automatically or user verified).
  Click the extension’s button to open the interface.
  If needed, choose “Year”, “Month”, “Text Contains” and “Text Not Contains” for posts that you want to delete.
• Run the Social Book Post Manager’s Deletion process
  Click the “Delete Post” button. The extension will scan through your Activity Log and mark all posts matching the conditions.
  The prescan process may take a long time, depending on number of posts to be deleted.
  After the prescan process finishes, there will be a Confirm button shown on top of the Facebook (TM) page. You may verify and uncheck certain posts as desired, then continue to actually delete the posts.
  When done, the extension reports total number of posts deleted.

WARNING: THIS WILL TAKE A LONG TIME
Note that this process may take all day – and may take multiple RUNS – in other words, you might have to do this several times because like any human doing things really really quickly, it misses things. It’s not flawless – and that’s Facebook’s fault.

This is a unique program because it really does work like a robot, deleting posts and “likes”, going through posts & comments one-by-one as fast as it can, as if you yourself were doing the deletions. (You will actually see it do it’s work)

This is because it doesn’t do anything programmatically (using APIs) against the Facebook web site – so Facebook can’t do anything to stop you. (Which they have with other tools that use Facebook APIs directly)

I had to run “Social Book Post Manager” probably 15 times to completely delete all the posts, comments, likes, and other content between 2001 & 2017. And I had it running all night, every night for 4 days across 3 different computers, each deleting a different year in my account. My account is now pristine & clean… and I never log into it unless I have to.