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DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts

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Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts

#31

Post by celestialcheese »

nostalgk wrote: post #5

Does anyone know if there is an equivalent to delete Facebook friends or unlike pages/leave groups? I really want to clean out my Facebook since I've had it for a very long time and much of it doesn't appeal to me anymore, but I don't necessarily want to lose the tiny social ecosystem I've created with my family. However, I would like to remove the hundreds of friends and pages that I don't talk to/don't represent me…

I did it a while back (3 or so years ago) by scrolling through the dialog so that all of my "friends" were loaded, and then opened up the browser console and wrote a line of JS to toggle the checkbox to delete each of them and saved.

Not sure if that's still the interface today, but it worked for me back then.

* Edit: I checked, and you can still do this. It's under the main preferences dropdown -> News Feed Preferences -> Unfollow people and groups to hide their posts

It's no longer a checbox, but you can simulate a click in JS. Haven't tested so obviously YMMV

Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts

#32

Post by RandomInteger4 »

traek wrote: post #15
AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #6

I don't trust the "delete" button to scrub it from FB's database. I'd be slightly more confident ( slightly ) that editing the post might cause the core data in the db to be updated, however. In which case, I think the more effective script would be one that goes through all of your FB posts and scrambles them, or replaces the text with gibberish.

> I'd be slightly more confident (slightly) that editing the post might cause the core data in the db to be updated I'd be much less confident, considering that they explicitly save and make public post's edit history.

Hmm ... I wonder if they have an edit limit where old edits get erased if you keep editing, sort of like that trick someone came up with years ago for pinging the credit bureau so many times so that eventually your credit looked better since old items were erased or not considered for your credit score ... or something.

Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts

#33

Post by eswat »

temp99990 wrote: post #21

Is there a “Marie Kondo” for the digital world? Seems like something or someone that could be just as relevant if not more than organizing your physical world.

The book Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport has a concept called Digital Declutter that’s a similar concept but towards distracting tech.

Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts

#34

Post by sdrinf »

nostalgk wrote: post #5

Does anyone know if there is an equivalent to delete Facebook friends or unlike pages/leave groups? I really want to clean out my Facebook since I've had it for a very long time and much of it doesn't appeal to me anymore, but I don't necessarily want to lose the tiny social ecosystem I've created with my family. However, I would like to remove the hundreds of friends and pages that I don't talk to/don't represent me…

I did this a year ago, and it considerably improved my Fb feed’s signal/noise ratio.

Specific procedure I’d recommend is to make this a regular process: open fb feed, read until you find a thing which does not improves your life, click on owner (author / group) -click “friend” -> unfollow. Iterate until sanity is restored.

And one moral of this story (hi Facebook, please understand this) is that people are multidimensional. Just because you know someone once, in one context in real life, does not, actually, imply positive relationship on informational ecologies for all time in the future. “Authentic self” as defined by Facebook as a single coherent identity is a lie.

Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts

#35

Post by code_duck »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #6

I don't trust the "delete" button to scrub it from FB's database. I'd be slightly more confident ( slightly ) that editing the post might cause the core data in the db to be updated, however. In which case, I think the more effective script would be one that goes through all of your FB posts and scrambles them, or replaces the text with gibberish.

I believe there is zero doubt that somewhere the text has been saved. Not only the original text, but also various results of analysis. Since they store edit history, too, replacing it with other text would simply be an indication that you’re trying to cover it up. I would guess that this has been demonstrated in court.

Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts

#36

Post by donatj »

sdrinf wrote: post #34
nostalgk wrote: post #5

Does anyone know if there is an equivalent to delete Facebook friends or unlike pages/leave groups? I really want to clean out my Facebook since I've had it for a very long time and much of it doesn't appeal to me anymore, but I don't necessarily want to lose the tiny social ecosystem I've created with my family. However, I would like to remove the hundreds of friends and pages that I don't talk to/don't represent me…

I did this a year ago, and it considerably improved my Fb feed’s signal/noise ratio. Specific procedure I’d recommend is to make this a regular process: open fb feed, read until you find a thing which does not improves your life, click on owner (author / group) -click “friend” -> unfollow. Iterate until sanity is restored. And one moral of this story (hi Facebook, please understand this) is that people are multidimen…

Maybe I'm too forgiving but I'll generally just snooze a person unless they're genuinely consistently horrible.

People change. I had friends who would post tireless political rants that just post memes now.

Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts

#37

Post by bryanrasmussen »

new_here wrote: post #23

About a two years ago my friends and I used to scroll back into each other’s posts from the early days and ‘like’ some of the most cringeworthy posts and photos we could find. It would cause them to bubble up into everyone’s newsfeeds again. Was a fun game. This script would have saved me some manual labour back then. (Edit: we also used to endorse each other on LinkedIn for the most bizarre skills we could find. Toi…

combine with a bayesian classifier trained on cringeworthy content?

Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts

#38

Post by anaphor »

leesec wrote: post #7

Any chance a feature could be added to delete posts by year? Would love to scrub like 5 years or so but keep some more relevant memories. Thank you.

Great idea. I had also thought of adding a feature to unfollow/unlike pages, but haven't had much time yet to work on it.

Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts

#39

Post by gricardo99 »

RandomInteger4 wrote: post #32
traek wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd be slightly more confident (slightly) that editing the post might cause the core data in the db to be updated I'd be much less confident, considering that they explicitly save and make public post's edit history.

Hmm ... I wonder if they have an edit limit where old edits get erased if you keep editing, sort of like that trick someone came up with years ago for pinging the credit bureau so many times so that eventually your credit looked better since old items were erased or not considered for your credit score ... or something.

> that trick someone came up with years ago for pinging the credit bureau so many times

That sounds hilarious. You don't happen to remember or have a source for that, do you? Would love to read more.

Re: DeleteFB: Selenium script to delete all of your Facebook wall posts

#40

Post by RandallBrown »

nostalgk wrote: post #5

Does anyone know if there is an equivalent to delete Facebook friends or unlike pages/leave groups? I really want to clean out my Facebook since I've had it for a very long time and much of it doesn't appeal to me anymore, but I don't necessarily want to lose the tiny social ecosystem I've created with my family. However, I would like to remove the hundreds of friends and pages that I don't talk to/don't represent me…

Facebook's algorithm should mostly do this by default. If you don't interact with people's posts, you'll see less of them.

You can explicitly mute people as well or even just certain websites. My aunt has been posting a ton of weird alt-right news lately and I've had pretty good success by just blocking her news sources so I can still see posts from her that I care about (family stuff.)

I also have a few friends who I've muted entirely because I still want to be able to contact them, but I really don't care about any of the stuff they're posting to facebook.

This might be a little more manual than you want, but it's pretty simple to just casually block posts you don't like as you scroll through your feed.

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