Facebook Erased Mark Zuckerberg’s Messages From Other Users’ Inboxes

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By Ari Feldman April 6, 2018

Facebook deleted Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook messages to other Facebook users from their chat history, Tech Crunch reported.

Normally, you can’t delete messages you’ve already sent to other Facebook users. But Facebook deleted Zuckerberg’s messages, so that users’ chat history with Zuckerberg shows just one side of the conversation. Facebook said it changed Zuckerberg’s Messenger settings in response the Sony email hacking in 2014, along with other changes.

“These [changes] included limiting the retention period for Mark’s messages in Messenger,” Facebook said in a statement to Tech Crunch. “We did so in full compliance with our legal obligations to preserve messages.”

Zuckerberg declined to comment directly.

Facebook never publicly announced the change to Zuckerberg’s Messenger settings, and its unclear when the change went into effect. The messages of Facebook users who are not executives of Facebook apparently do not expire.

Sources told Tech Crunch that recent messages from Zuckerberg are still visible, as are some messages from before 2014.

It is possible that Facebook moved to delete potentially embarrassing comments. In 2010, Business Insider published a chat log between Zuckerberg and a friend. In the messages, Zuckerberg calls early Facebook users “dumb fucks” for trusting him and putting their personal information in their Facebook profile.

Facebook Messenger as 1.3 billion users worldwide.

Contact Ari Feldman at [email protected] or on Twitter @aefeldman

Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. He covers Jewish religious organizations, synagogue life, anti-Semitism and the Orthodox world. If you have any tips, you can email him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @aefeldman.

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