Is Facebook launching a 'self-destruct' feature?

Facebook is trialing a new feature which allows users to set a self-destruct timer on their posts, automatically deleting them after a set amount of time. But will it catch on?

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Facebook posts could soon have a "best before" date Credit: Photo: ALAMY

Facebook has been trialing a new feature which allows users to set a self-destruct timer on their posts, automatically deleting them after a set amount of time.

A small number of users noticed that the new feature had appeared in their Facebook iOS app and took to Twitter to share their findings. User Ben Young asked: “Facebook has a new post expiration option?” While Jen Flitter said: “New #Facebook feature. Post expiration dates?! Spotted this tonight.”

According to the screenshots users are being given the option of allowing the post to survive for anywhere from just one hour to a week. After that time, the post is deleted.

A Facebook spokesperson told The Next Web: “We’re running a small pilot of a feature on Facebook for iOS that lets people schedule deletion of their posts in advance.”

The company often tests new features on a handful of users to assess how popular it would prove to be if rolled-out to the whole social network. Doing small scale experiments is less risky than sending new features to the 500m users who log-in each day.

Whether it is permanently deleted or not is unclear, but it seems likely that it will remain on Facebook’s servers.

The feature is far from Facebook’s first attempt at launching an ephemeral messaging service. In 2012 it launched a standalone Poke app which allowed people to send text, photos or videos and set a time limit on how long they would be viewable by the recipient. Once the time limit was up, the message was deleted.

Unfortunately for Facebook, it wasn’t a huge success and disappeared almost as quickly as one of its messages.

The company’s next attempt to enter the market was to buy its dominant player, Snapchat. It reportedly offered $3bn, which was rejected.

Earlier this year it launched the Slingshot app, which works on a similar premise, and is still available as a free download.

But despite Facebook’s apparent obsession with temporary messages, it seems reluctant to delete content from its own archive.

But the company has just released a paper which reveals that it tracks when we start to write - but do not publish - comments and post, something which researchers call “self-censorship”.

Facebook monitored 3.9 million users in the US and UK over 17 days in the summer of 2012 and tracked when they started to write messages but later abandoned them. Posts were only counted if at least five characters were entered, to prevent noise from accidental key presses, and were counted as censored if they had not been posted within ten minutes.

It was found that 71 per cent of people censored themselves at some point during the experiment, with 51 per cent deleting at least one post and choosing to leave 4.52 unpublished on average over the period. Another 44 per cent censored comments, with an average of 3.2 going unpublished.