Facebook has made it impossible to delete Pages – dark patterns everywhere | Hacker News Reader

Facebook has made it impossible to delete Pages – dark patterns everywhere

47 pointsramharts16 comments

I'm honestly shocked at how bad the current Facebook interface has become. I’m trying to delete a Page I own, and the platform basically makes it impossible. The options have moved or disappeared, the Page Settings menu leads to the wrong profile, Business Suite doesn’t show the Page, and the “Access and Control” section doesn’t list it at all.

Facebook keeps bouncing me between: – personal profile settings – business portfolio settings – Meta Business Suite – classic Page UI

None of them give the actual option to delete the Page. It’s like the platform actively hides the feature.

And here’s the worst part: I AM the admin. I can publish on the Page. I can edit it. I can manage everything… except delete it.

I get that Meta wants to keep pages alive for engagement and ad data, but blocking users from removing something they own is straight-up abusive UX. No user should have to waste hours navigating four different interfaces to do something basic like “delete a page.”

If anyone has figured out the REAL way to delete a Page in 2025 with the new Facebook UI (which keeps changing), please share. Meta’s documentation is outdated, and their support is nonexistent.

This shouldn’t be this hard.

I'm a physician with a very rare name and recently discovered a fake profile with "my exact name, MD" with 75 friends from one (very foreign) country, some fake pictures of someone likely AI generated....all made in the last week or two, clearly a prelude to some form of scam or reputation ruining extortion attempt...and it's impossible to take it down. I've tried. And if you Google me this profile is on the first page.

Someone stole my likeness to harm me or gullible innocent's, this is going to come back to burn me, and there's nothing I can do.

Cool dystopia!

If you own the pictures, or know who does.. arrange a DMCA? There's also several new laws about misusing some bodies likeness. (One thing everybody can pat AI on the back for)

> some fake pictures of someone likely AI generated

I too have seen "my exact name" clones on Facebook both for myself and family members. Last I checked they were generic photos but that was pre-AI. I reported them and moved on. I haven't materially used Facebook in years since then, though.

This is where the confusion is: ”trying to delete a Page I own".

You don't own the page. Facebook owns it. You _authored_ the page, and _gave_ it to Facebook, and now they can do anything they want with it.

I have a couple of old pages that I've been meaning to delete. I just tried to see how bad it was. It took 12 clicks, including the 3 clicks to switch into that page. Not nearly as hard as you are making it sound, I'm not fan of Meta, but how much of your post is hyperbole?

12 clicks and you think there's no problem?

It's a hell of a lot better than OP's take that you can't delete it at all.

Click 1: Open profile switcher

Click 2: See all profiles

Click 3: Choose page I want to delete

Click 4: Open profile switcher

Click 5: Settings & Privacy

Click 6: Settings

Click 7: Access and Control

Click 8: Change radio button from default "Deactivate Page" to "Delete Page"

Click 9: Continue

Click 10: Option to download data, continue.

Click 11: Password confirmation, continue.

Click 12: Confirm deletion, no take backs, do not pass go, do not collect $200.

I have experienced the same. I stopped using Facebook years ago, but I can’t get my family members to stop using it. I was helping (tried to help) a family member with their Facebook page - it was depressingly bad.

I don’t know what they achieve by making their site so unusable. But then a Billion people still use it, maybe I am the idiot here?

If you cannot delete your Facebook content because they won’t let you then enlist them to do it for you. Litter your content with a bunch of anti-Zionist text and see if it disappears.

Since you can edit the page, can you get rid of all its contents, effectively making it a blank page?

Without laws controlling powerful corporations, you own nothing. If the law does not state in very explicit terms that you have the right to modify/delete content that you have created then who has more power is the one that decides.

Laws and regulations are created to help society over the interest of a few corporations or individuals. Without that we have no rights.

just wait until op finds out they can't delete this post.

No kidding. A platform like this where I can't control my content can only be used for anonymous throwaway comments. Nothing serious.

That's not really like-to-like, though. Forums come with an up-front caveat that you can't remove content. It's not in the fine print, it's how forums work. If people could just delete content the whole premise of forums wouldn't work.

With Meta, obvious anti-human decisions are being made that explicitly hurt people.

It's alarming how many blatantly anti-human features they've deployed. The one that gets me is arbitrarily restricting users from deactivating their Instagram account. You can only deactivate your account a week after re-activating it.

Why? Because some sociopathic moron thought that was a good idea, instead of just letting users access a feature.

How toxic must their corporate culture be to get this bad?

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