Facebook 'mistakenly deleted' years of Mark Zuckerberg's old Facebook posts | Hacker News Reader

Facebook 'mistakenly deleted' years of Mark Zuckerberg's old Facebook posts

businessinsider.com

233 pointscrones87 comments

Sounds like they are getting tripped up in a lie. In one of the linked articles on techcrunch FB legal says; " we made a number of changes to protect our executives’ communications. These included limiting the retention period for Mark’s messages"

Retention policies are quite common in lots of companies. If I had to guess his posts were treated in the same way, but given it's FB of course there's an unnecessary lie weaved in, because well it's FB

It doesn't matter, they're gone. He doesn't care if you don't believe why and how you think you've BUSTED! him. He's a zillionaire, it's not going to happen.

As a point of clarity: Messages are a different product and system to posts. Facebook have previously revealed that they have a deletion process for his messages. Given that a lot of internal communication happens through Facebook messenger instead of email this is not that shocking.

It's entirely possible that they also intended to delete his internal (company-wide) posts, and ended up deleting them all in error. Posts from 2011 don't really serve any purpose other than to be a goldmine for disgruntled employees who want to cherry pick something controversial. Public posts don't have the same problem because they are written with heavy PR oversight, and deletion is pointless because they will have been scraped and stored anyway.

Posts from the past serve the purpose of integrity. When you delete the old posts because employees, disgruntled for some reason, keep finding gold there, you compromise your integrity, and anyone treats your words as if they're going to be taken back tomorrow.

That's exactly what we observe now.

Context matters. Facebook from 2009 is a different company to 2019.

When Google was 10x the size of Facebook and preparing to launch Google+ the battle cry of "Carthage must be destroyed" was empowering against something that seemed like an existential threat to the company. Take it out of that time and place and its aggressive and creepy.

How many companies would make historical all-company emails accessible and searchable by future staff? Doing so means that companies now need to treat absolutely every internal email as potentially public and run it through an PR filter. That's a huge cost for a company that wants to move fast.

There's no need to goodfaithsplain Zuck. Nobody cares. As a Russian proverb goes, "we're not gonna christen babies with him". You fuck up, you own it. Owning mistakes gives a hope, that you will learn from them.

>> How many companies would make historical all-company emails accessible and searchable by future staff?

I don't know. Most of them? It's not really that hard...

Honestly, this really doesn't matter.

If there was problematic content,

a. Do you really think they would raise suspicion by deleting all old posts or just silently delete specific posts? If I we're a big CEO the internet had a fairly negative opinion of, I would assume that somebody has the old content archived.

b. Do we really need to raise a twitter storm for every public figure that did something controversial 10 years ago?

Edit: I'm just gonna leave this here: https://www.zuckerbergfiles.org/access/

For every public figure no of course we should not care.

For a big CEO running a major global communications platform and who is insisting that it is transparent, safe, and generally fine as an unregulated entity yes, this is a big hypocritical deal.

Not about whether we have kept the records stored somewhere, but whether we can trust Facebook to do the same.

>> a. Do you really think they would raise suspicion by deleting all old posts or just silently delete specific posts?

How? By asking Mark Z to spend the time doing it? Or to have a third person involved, who will then need to be trusted for 1000% loyalty that he won't eventually turn? Or do you think this can somehow be automated?

>> b. Do we really need to raise a twitter storm for every public figure that did something controversial 10 years ago?

Yes, until the public figure gets a punishment which will actually be a deterrent for others in the future.

>> Edit: I'm just gonna leave this here: https://www.zuckerbergfiles.org/access/

That's not even comparable. If there is a public post that can actually be linked to as proof of some kind of opinion or statement, its completely different isn't it?

Isn't it amazing how much the turds who work at Facebook want to snoop into our life and are simultaneously happy to give a free pass to their own CEO?

Right. "Mistakenly deleted", Not recoverable, gone, zilch.

Great way to wash away history.

Why not start a service to take money from FB users and permanently "mistakenly" delete their content too?

When I was going through and manually removing my old posts, I couldn't delete any older than a number of years, and just got an error. I'd prefer the other bug.

In case you decide to try it again, I wrote a little Selenium script in Python that works pretty well (although it took 3 days to complete for about 12 years of FB posts) https://github.com/weskerfoot/DeleteFB/blob/master/deletefb....

I will check it out. Looks awesome. Thanks for sharing!

I don't understand why people delete their past Facebook posts. considering it's highly unlikely they are actually deleted in the backend (and not just flagged)

Mostly to make myself feel less tied to it. I have no illusion that it does anything more than remove a reference to them.

People don't want someone they know to see retrospectively embarrassing old posts.

It's true the posts could be archived by Facebook or another entity. They could conceivably be republished widely by a bug or someone malicious. But at least this way they won't resurface in the normal course of business.

Not true in a post GDPR world.

I don't mean to hijack this thread but please see my question about deleting FB account before GDPR happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19527715

Looking forward to reading the postmortem from Facebook's IT team on why this happened and how they plan to prevent it from happening to other users...

It probably happened because someone used Zuck's id, 4, as an id in a test (because people happen to do that all the time), which then ended up mistakenly deleting the old posts.

Classic case of unit tests running on production and backups simultaneously. Real shame.

This actually isn't that unlikely

It would be a really great if some one helped Facebook undelete some of Zuck's old disappearing posts. Maybe put them on a server like archive.org where he can't touch them?

Hey can I have access to this service and mistakenly delete all my facebook history? Maybe set it up on a rolling basis and have it wipe everything a year old or so?

Image sanitization. Why? Maybe political aspirations or deprecating old opinions.

I think even zuck would have given up on any political aspirations at this point. He's a total pariah.

Honestly, who wants to be a billionaire at this point? Even if you promise to give away 99% of your money everyone still hates you.

Nah, everybody loves Warren Buffett.

The annoying thing with most billionaires is not that they have and spend a lot of money, but that they try to force their values onto the rest of us via lobbying, "charity" and other actions designed to leave a legacy. Newsflash: if you don't try to subversively manipulate the world with your gazillions of money as enabling tool, you don't need to redeem yourself by giving 99% of it away.

Not that giving it away is a bad idea, because dynasties suck.

People seem to like Bill Gates a lot. And half the country really likes Trump.

Given who he is and has been, I'm almost certain that some have archived all or most all of his public posts. And hey, I can point them to someone who'll host them anonymously ;)

In the article there is an example of a blog post that is missing on blog.facebook.com but can be found on web.archive.org. I could be wrong but I think changes to robots.txt can make pages "disappear" from Internet Archive, too. Many have made the mistake of assuming what is at web.archive.org is "permanent" only to watch it "disappear" when the domain name registration lapses and robots.txt changes.

I'm surprised the Wayback Machine doesn't account for that by figuring "well our archive of this predates the current robots.txt, so let's not remove it".

You don't need to be surprised. We do account for what you reference.

>Our app is a wiretap that records all your audio, which we run through top data analysis programs for marketing, which we also incorporate as we track all your activity across the web. >We also don't have the ability to put some messages back in a database.

Everyone should take his lead and delete old posts on fb.

I'm starting to wonder if they mistakenly not deleted my profile when I specifically asked them to do so.

This happened to me, too. I only found out when Firefox on my home PC filled in my old user name and password when I logged in, and I didn’t notice.

I deleted my account. Then I went to an event at Facebook’s campus and was asked to sign in on a tablet. Sure enough, there was my profile pic staring back at me...

Are you in the EU? That’s a GDPR complaint.

No, the US. This was about two years ago, before the GDPR existed. The same thing might not happen now.

> "A few years ago some of Mark's posts were mistakenly deleted due to technical errors. The work required to restore them would have been extensive and not guaranteed to be successful so we didn't do it," the spokesperson said in a statement.

> ...

> These disappearances, along with other changes Facebook has made to how it saves its archive of announcements and blog posts, make it much harder to parse the social network's historical record. This makes it far more difficult to hold the company, and Zuckerberg himself, accountable to past statements — particularly during a period of intense scrutiny of the company in the wake of a string of scandals.

I frankly don't believe them at all. This is the same company that implemented special features to automatically delete his old FB Messenger messages in a way unavailable to normal users, so it would be harder for them to come back to haunt him: https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/05/zuckerberg-deleted-message.... They have zero credibility in this regard.

Yeah he might have billions of dollars, but it was just too expensive to restore his data. Might've cost something like hundreds or maybe even thousands of dollars. Who can afford that in this day and age? We say data should be ephemeral and easily forgotten so everyone isn't held to account for every little thing they do in the past on the social network.

Remember when trees didn't rot when they died, the wood just piled up?

That's where we are with data. In the early days data was scarce and valuable. Then it was ubiquitous. Now it's a fire risk. One day it will be not just default, but good, that data rots.

It's kinda weird to hold someone accountable for things they said 10+ years ago. That's a weird "feature" of modern Life, but it's only been possible since this century.

People have memories too you know. Why should someone’s close associates be the only ones with insight into a person’s true character? People can change a lot in 10 years, so whatever criticism is levied against them may no longer be applicable. But people also tend to get better at hiding their real thoughts, especially if they are now a public figure, and don’t always change in consistent or even good ways over time.

Some books have words and ideas from many hundreds of years ago. Newspapers as well. Statements in court are written down as well.

Yeah, but books were always intentional works of art in which a lot of thought goes into them. Newspapers would at best record public interviews or press conferences but even then they would often paraphrase. Admit it, casual speech recorded for posterity is a weird feature of modern life.

Public utterances from the CEO's of billion dollar companies historically landed in newspapers or archives so I don't see how it is accurate to say that this sort of speech was somehow ephemeral in the past.

Newspapers didn't have a full text search index.

No, they only ended up in newspapers when they were news at the time.

They always threatened in school 'this will go down on your permanent record', and then we went ahead and built one.

Sure but it’s a weird feature he developed for profit. Odd that he is excluded but we aren’t.

You can delete your old posts if you find them embarrassing.

Nonsense. You can flag them as embarrassing and hope for the best. They are not deleted. If you think they are actually deleted nothing I or anyone else says can help you, I'm sorry.

I think they stop appearing in the public record, which is the thing people are talking about in this thread.

It's also weird for this same person to hold immense power over social and political life across the globe, but yeah kinda weird.

If being held accountable for what you said 10 years ago were something new (it isn't) then Zuckerberg would only have himself to blame for ushering such a social change (however he's not to blame for it. People holding past statements against each other has been going on ever since the dawn of recorded history.)

I imagine people in your life also hold you accountable for things you did 20 years ago. Your actions define you and people remember.

It used to be, though, that if people were defining you by something you did years ago, and you didn't want this, you could move to another town far enough way that there wasn't much social overlap between people in your new and old towns.

Unless what you were trying to get away from was a fairly serious crime, there was a good chance the new people in your life wouldn't find out about it unless you told them about it.

Now the old stuff is on the internet, and you can be stuck with it unless you go to more extreme lengths like changing your name.

I feel like it would be pretty trivial for the average person to get rid of their social presence. If they used their real names on things like e.g. forums then yeah, that will follow them.

I don't even have much of a "social presence" but Ive definitely had certain specific affairs of my day to day life affected for the negative (applying for credit to buy a house) just because I have a very boring, mundane and incredibly common (American) name that shows up in all sorts of databases even though I'm not the exact and specific person with my name convicted of, among other things: grand larceny.

For this reasons and others I've given real thought to pursuing a legal name change.

Oh wow. That sucks. Maybe you could just add your grandfather's name as a middle name, or something like that.

The grand and hilarious paradox is that I was already named after my grandfather, heh.

It's not just social media nowadays, though. Do something stupid or embarrassing that makes your high school or college newspaper, or the blogs of your fellow students, and it is probably online and in search engines.

True. I lucked out a bit by finishing school in the late 90's.

Holding people accountable for personal actions taken 10+ years ago is one thing. Holding them accountable for public statements made on behalf of a hugely influential company is different altogether.

The phenomenon is weird, from a historical lens, but I don’t think it’s strange to hold one of the people most responsible for (and most profiting from) the phenomenon to be bound by it as strongly as the rest of us.

Worth noting that this 'feature' on messenger is now available to all users although it is limited to 10 minutes and not years ago.

Why is it weird? Companies can define email retention policies for their systems. Facebook (the company) uses Facebook (the product) as a communications platform, so Messages fills the same purpose as Slack or email would.

Facebook's Workplace product advertises "Schedule content retention/deletion based on your policy" as a feature[1]. The only reason they needed to manually delete Zuck's old messages is that Facebook's usage of the product in this way predates Workplace.

1: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/workplace/integrations/...

I wonder if anyone has previously taken the trouble to archive some of the dorkier Zuckerberg images?

"mistakenly"

What was the book with the "Memory Hole"?

"1984"

ahh if we only had a copy of dob's efnet irc history from 1990's... glad no one keeps logs of that

The contempt their CEO continues to display for its users is honestly something else. 'Dumb f*s' indeed.

How do I sign up for the “mistakenly deleted” profile service that’s not backed up on Facebook?

I would pay for this.

You don't. It costs at least a few billion dollars.

That just may be worth it :).

Hah yah he gets the history delete button that doesn’t exist.

Didn't MySpace recently and "mistakenly" delete years of music uploads shortly before the EU's Article 13/17 passed? Which has the potential to cause quite a few expensive problems for them.

A lot of accidental data spoliation happening in social media these days.

(I'm being facetious.)

Has anyone else’s data been ‘mistakenly deleted’ or just Zuck’s?

Seems more like a feature than a bug.

I wish I could delete my older content. I want to delete everything except for this year from my timeline.

Or could I use the GDPR for this?

Their famous interview process picks only the best and the brightest in the cosmos, but these geniuses cannot perform proper backups of data in a company whose bread and butter is data?

What a load of bullshit.

Do people in this thread not realize that Facebook users have been able to delete old posts for years already?

I'd be interested in the time between when I click 'delete' and the last bits disappearing off a Facebook storage medium.

How do you define "delete"?

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