Watch: Here’s how to delete your embarrassing Facebook posts in bulk [video]

If you been on Facebook for a decade or more, chances are you have a smorgasbord of embarrassing posts you’d like to delete. Here’s how to use the Manage Activity feature.

Not so long ago, I tried to scroll through my Facebook timeline and hide all those embarrassing posts. The thing is, I signed up in 2007 and I only managed to scroll back to 2017.

Shockingly, there is still about a decade’s worth of old posts. Many of them haunt me. If you, too, want to banish your past entries from memory, keep reading.

Facebook introduced ‘Manage Activity’

Back in June, Facebook announced a new bulk-delete feature. It was introduced as ‘Manage Activity’. Its aim is to make it easier to remove old, unwanted posts in bulk, instead of scrolling for hours through your timeline and deleting your past entries one by one.

Facebook said that Manage Activity will only be available on the mobile app for now, and a desktop app will be released at a later stage. In addition, the feature allows you to move posts you no longer want to trash.

Your “trashed” entries will be available for 30 days before being deleted unless you choose to manually delete or restore them before then. Just in case you change your mind before the timer runs out. The feature has its faults, but it will do for now.

Watch: How to bulk-delete Facebook posts

How to use Facebook’s ‘Manage Activity’ feature

The Manage Activity feature is situated on your profile page, nestled under the three dots next to Add To Story. From there, select your Activity Log.

At the top of the Activity Log page, you’ll find the Manage Activity prompt. From there, a pop-up will ask you to select Your Posts. You’ll see three buttons on the Manage Your Posts page: Filter, Archive and Trash

From the filter button, you’ll be able to search for your posts by Category, Date and People. Once a filter has been chosen, you can click on the filtered posts and either Archive ’em or send it to the Trash. Both buttons will appear at the bottom of the screen.

Trash buffer

Remember, you’ll have 30 days to make up your mind about Trashed items, and will be able to restore them at a later date, if you choose to do so. You can access trashed posts by clicking the button labelled Trash at the top of the screen.

From there, you can either view the trashed entry, restore it, archive it or permanently delete it. Unfortunately, Verge pointed out that Facebook will only delete posts in the visible list, and it will only expand the list as you scroll down.

As per their test, the app paused after every ten posts. That means cleaning up a decade of old posts will take some time, but it’s still a tad bit faster than deleted posts one-by-one.

Hopefully, this is just the first version of the Manage Activity feature. Future updates would perhaps streamline it a bit and make it easier to delete more posts in one go.