Your Facebooks Edits are Visible-- WNYC

Every Edit You've Ever Made to a Facebook Post Is Visible

Sunday, January 05, 2014 - 06:01 PM

By PJ Vogt

• Share
• Tweet
• Print
• Email

A lot of people know that Facebook gives you the ability to edit your status updates or comments after posting them. If you make a tiny grammatical error, or realize that there’s a punchier way to make a joke, you can sneak in and quickly improve your post.

• Join the Discussion [8]

Except, as it turns out, those tiny fixes and changes aren’t so secret after all. Anyone who can see your post can see a full history of its edits. All they have to do is click the gray text that reads "Edited" at the bottom of your comment, just to the left of the "Like" button.

I poked around on Facebook to find a quick example of an edited post and found this comment by a woman named Pamela J. Miller, who had posted on Barack Obama’s Facebook page.

Of course I was intrigued: what could the first draft of “aND YOU ARE RIGHT, I BET HE HAS NO BALLS :)” look like?

So, I clicked the edit button, and, voila:

BERT replaced with the much more understandable BET.

So, there you go. Maybe everyone else on earth already knew this, but I didn’t. And now I feel retroactively embarrassed for all the tiny changes I thought I was subtly making. 

Tags:

• facebook
• news you can use
• technology
• tldr

More in:

• TLDR

• 

  PJ Vogt

  PJ Vogt is on Twitter here. If you'd like to subscribe to TLDR's short weekly podcast, please go here.