Facebook is one of the best sites for meeting people and reconnecting old relationships with friends from school or university but, as often happens, it is used lightly, without the slightest attention to what we write or share.
It so happens that, after a few years, we regret what we wrote or shared at the time, or we want to hide our past unattractive business. In order to remedy the mistakes of the past, in this guide we will show you how to hide messages on your Facebook profile, so that our future messages can only be read by some trusted friends and we will also show you how to archive or remove tags from old messages, so that we can put our diary in order without fearing too much for privacy.
READ ALSO: Hide Facebook profile and make yourself invisible
Set message privacy
To set the privacy of a post on Facebook before sharing it, we click on the Privacy button at the bottom, in the input field, and we choose who will be able to see the message sent.
Choosing All, the message will be public and can also be seen by users not on our friend’s list and by people not yet registered on Facebook. If we want to filter the people who can see the messages, we select Friends to show messages only to friends added to the account, otherwise, we click Friends except to exclude some friends from viewing the message.
By clicking on the button Other, we will unlock new privacy options, useful for further filtering the people who can (or not) view the content: choosing Specific friends, the message will be visible only by the selected friends; selecting Only me the message will be visible only from our profile (the message will actually be private); selecting Friends’ group we will be able to send the message only to friends in a group (as we will see below); by pressing on Show all, we can select the Closer friends (those with whom we are most often in contact) or select a group, a place we have attended (university, school, etc.) or a place where we have been (our city of birth, our current city of residence, etc.) .
The buttons we showed you are slightly different if we want to share the message like History, instead of simple post; once the content of the story is prepared, select the button at the bottom Your story, so we click on the button Privacy present on the side.
In this window we can choose All to have all Facebook and Messenger users view the story, select Friends and contacts show the story only to Facebook friends and Messenger contacts or to show the story only to friends on Facebook (by selecting the button Friends).
If we want the privacy setting for the messages to be ready when we write a message (without having to fiddle with the specific button each time), let’s go to the arrow-shaped menu at the top right, select the menu Settings so let’s click on the menu Privacy.
Do we change the setting Who can see your future posts? setting the item we think is most appropriate.
Create a list of friends
Friends lists, as we showed you in the Facebook privacy settings guide, is perhaps the most boring operation but also the most important for having a protected account that can be used without worries. Lists can be easily created by clicking on Friends list from the list on the left (it could be hidden: let’s see it by pressing on Other) and selecting the button Create a list.
A window will open where we will only have to choose friends to include in it. The lists can then be used to decide who can see and what about themselves.
In addition to personal lists, Facebook also offers lists of friends ready, based on our interests and the places where we lived (cities, schools, universities, etc.).
Once we have created our friend’s list, we can use it in the menu Privacy before sending a message on the bulletin board, so as to hide what you share from a specific person or friends not on the list.
Archive old messages and remove tags
To prevent someone from seeing our old messages on Facebook or if we want to hide a message posted some time ago, we can modify all the old posts by adding the desired level of privacy.
Let’s go back to the arrow-shaped menu at the top right, click on the menu Settings then we select the menu Privacy. From here we press on the item Limit past posts and then on the homonymous button.
This way, all the old messages that had privacy set to All or up Friends of friends, will be modified instantly, obtaining as a level of privacy Friends (only our friends can see the old messages).
If instead, we wanted to change the presence of the tags in the photos, let’s get into the menu Diary and tag addition, so we modify the entries Do you want to check the posts where they tag you before the post is displayed in your diary? is Do you want to check the tags that people add to your posts before the tags are displayed on Facebook?, setting them both up Yup.
If instead, we wanted to remove a single tag from a photo or a message, it is sufficient to visualize the latter, right-click on the three dots in the upper right corner of the content and use the item Remove the tag.
As a last tip to increase Facebook’s privacy, we’ll show you how to handle multiple messages at once, so as to choose whether to archive them (ie make them visible only to us) or change the privacy of the tags.
We click on our profile picture, top left (where our name and surname are also present); Once we open our personal page, we click on the button Manage posts.
After pressing on this button, we select all the messages we have published or in which we have been tagged (up to a maximum of 50), we click below on Come on and select what to do:
- Hide posts: useful for storing messages (which will become visible only to us);
- Remove tags: allows you to remove our tag from the photo;
- Delete the post: allows you to permanently delete the message from Facebook, without the possibility of recovery (only if the message was written by us).
Conclusions
Even though Facebook often speaks as one of the sites that respect less the user’s privacy (and in many ways, it is so), the site has evolved so much that it offers full control over the privacy of messages and content shared on the social network, so as not to fear anything.
If we want to create a secret chat with a Facebook contact, we invite you to read our guide on How to use the secret chat in Facebook Messenger. If instead, we are afraid of taking viruses or seeing our personal information stolen on Facebook, I suggest you read our in-depth information on how Avoid viruses on Facebook and applications that steal personal data.