Facebook Messenger will soon let you ‘unsend’ a message

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• Facebook Messenger will soon introduce a feature that lets
  you delete a message up to 10 minutes after it’s already been
  sent.
• The new feature was spotted in the release notes for the
  newest Messenger update, but for now it’s still listed as “coming
  soon.” 
• Facebook
  said in April it planned to add such a feature after the
  platform was caught
  quietly deleting messages that CEO Mark Zuckerberg had sent
  via Messenger.

Facebook will soon allow you to delete messages that you’ve
already sent via its Messenger app.

Plans for the “unsend” feature were found in the release
notes for the newest Messenger app update made available to
iOS users Tuesday. The note states that users will be able to
remove a message within 10 minutes of sending it “if you
accidentally send the wrong photo, incorrect information or
message the wrong thread.”

The release notes say that the feature is “coming soon,”
but didn’t give an exact date for when it would arrive on users’
phones. 

Facebook first floated plans for rolling out the “unsend”
feature back in April. The announcement was in response to
TechCrunch’s
report that the social network had been
quietly deleting old messages from its CEO Mark Zuckerberg
over fears of future hacks and data breaches. The revelations
were met with heavy backlash.

Months passed by without any additional updates from
Facebook on the feature, but TechCrunch
reported last month that the feature was being tested
internally, as evidenced
by screenshots posted on Twitter.

Read more: 


Facebook
was caught secretly deleting Mark Zuckerberg’s sent messages
— here’s what it’s doing about it

Experts have previously expressed concerns that allowing
users to “unsend” messages could have severe implications, since
such a feature could allow evidence of harassment and abuse via
Messenger to be erased.

But similar features already exist on other apps that Facebook
owns: WhatsApp users were
given the ability last year to delete messages for up to an
hour after they’re initially sent, and
Instagram has let you “unsend” messages ever since direct
messaging was first added to the platform in 2013.

The addition of the “unsend” feature on Facebook Messenger
is in addition to the
app’s “secret conversations” feature, where users can have
their messages expire after a set amount of time.