Facebook has more than 1.23 billion active monthly users, 945 million mobile users and a staggering 757 million daily users, all of whom probably have posts buried deep within their timelines which they have forgotten about or would be embarrassed for a friend, colleague or even a potential new employer to see. So in this article, we’re going to help spare your blushes and show you how to remove Facebook posts from your timeline.
So you want to remove Facebook posts
Now before we begin the tutorial, you should be aware that this is aimed at desktop users, and the first thing you should do is check to see what your timeline looks like to the public. This means anyone who is not already your friend.
Check your public profile
Doing this is easy, but if you don’t know how, here is what you need to do.
- Go to the three little dots next to the padlock at the top of your profile and click them.
- In the dropdown, scroll down and click View As. You should see something similar to the image below.
Next, have a look through the publicly visible posts, and if you see something that shouldn’t be there, click the date under your name and choose who can see the posts. The choices are Public, Friends, or Only Me.
How to hide / remove Facebook posts
If you discover that you have many posts that people who are not friends can see, Facebook has developed a tool that can help you fix this problem quickly. To use this tool, do the following:
- Cick the padlock in the top-right corner.
- In the dropdown, scroll to the bottom and click See More Settings, and then choose Limit Past Posts.
Tagging and timeline settings
Once you have completed the above, you could leave it at that. But if you want to make sure your Timeline settings are set up correctly, it is easy to do.
- Click the Padlock again and then click on Timeline and Tagging on the the left-hand side. As a rule of thumb, we advise you to mark the first, fourth, and seventh options as Friends.
So that’s everything you need to know about how to remove Facebook posts and how to keep them private and away from prying eyes. After all, you never know who is looking at your posts and for what reason. So having that little bit of extra knowledge can help you stay safe and secure on what is still the world’s most-used social network.
If you have any Facebook security tips that you would like to share with us and our readers, please do so in the comment section below.
