FaceBook’s Primitive Content Management System

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Facebook’s Primitive Content Management System, because aside from being a social media platform, it is a CMS, makes it very hard to delete posts, images, and more in bulk. Facebook should be seen as a CMS because it allows us to share images, posts, events, and more.

As a CMS we should have more control over how we handle our data on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks. Privacy settings that are not bulk editable retro-actively, are not of much use because no one will spend days or weeks tidying up their timelines.

With a CMS like WordPress you can go to See all posts, choose “show two hundred posts” and you can delete 200 posts at a time. This means that, if for any reason you decide to tidy up old content, you can do so within a short period of time.

With Facebook, you have three choices. Choice one is to go and manually delete thousands of posts and spend several days doing so. The second option is simply to delete your old Facebook account and start from scratch and the third option is simply to dump Facebook entirely.

Facebook should offer users the option to curate their content quickly and efficiently. It currently has a monopoly because it is the primary social network that people use to share events, participate in group discussions and more.

As with real life we have good days and we have bad days. It should be possible to delete multiple posts at once. With spam comments we can “Empty spam” both in e-mail applications and WordPress comment sections.

Every e-mail client allows us to delete multiple messages at once. Inbox Zero and other concepts rely on this.

With MySQL we can drop the post table in less than a second. We should have such functionality on Facebook, Instagram and other social networks. Without this functionality we are limited in who we can accept as friends. We can only accept people whom we know and trust not to form prejudiced opinions based on what we wrote on a bad day.

If the only way to set the clock back to zero on Facebook and Twitter is to delete our accounts then we are encouraged to dump social networks altogether.

In the age of GDPR and other privacy-protecting measures these options should be available to users. We should also have an option to say “If user=”new” show “only posts from the day we became friends on Facebook””.