Facebook is experimenting with messages that are automatically deleted

Facebook is experimenting with a feature that lets users add posts that are automatically deleted after a certain amount of time. For example, a message can be automatically deleted after an hour.

At the moment, the feature seems to offer the option of automatically deleting messages within a period of one hour to a week. For the time being, it is a small-scale trial that is only available to iOS users of Facebook, the social network informs The Next Web. It is therefore not yet known whether the feature will eventually be rolled out to all users.

The functionality is reminiscent of Snapchat, where messages can also be deleted automatically, but this involves much shorter periods. It’s unclear whether deleted posts will remain visible to the user who posted them after their expiration date, or whether they will be removed from Facebook completely.