
Facebook 'mistakenly deleted' years of Mark Zuckerberg's old Facebook posts - crones
https://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-old-posts-mark-zuckerberg-disappeared-2019-3
======
flokie
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

~~~
underwater
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.

~~~
nbabitskiy
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.

~~~
underwater
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.

~~~
nbabitskiy
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...

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mistersys
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/](https://www.zuckerbergfiles.org/access/)

~~~
throwaway_9168
>> 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/](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?

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kumarvvr
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?

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moonka
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.

~~~
anaphor
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....](https://github.com/weskerfoot/DeleteFB/blob/master/deletefb.py)

~~~
julien_c
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)

~~~
dannyw
Not true in a post GDPR world.

~~~
gtirloni
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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19527715)

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hashberry
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...

~~~
gaogao
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.

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

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VectorLock
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?

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tomc1985
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?

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

~~~
yyyyip
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.

~~~
jpetso
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.

------
mirimir
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 ;)

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3xblah
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.

~~~
yellowapple
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".

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

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gasbikesracecar
>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.

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Deckard256
Everyone should take his lead and delete old posts on fb.

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rohan1024
I'm starting to wonder if they mistakenly not deleted my profile when I
specifically asked them to do so.

~~~
city41
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...

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

~~~
city41
No, the US. This was about two years ago, before the GDPR existed. The same
thing might not happen now.

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ardy42
> "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...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/05/zuckerberg-deleted-messages/).
They have zero credibility in this regard.

~~~
chrisco255
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.

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

~~~
chrisco255
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.

~~~
Barrin92
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.

~~~
hueving
No, they only ended up in newspapers when they were _news_ at the time.

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

------
slater
"mistakenly"

------
mr_spothawk
What was the book with the "Memory Hole"?

~~~
bookofjoe
"1984"

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

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

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

I would pay for this.

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

~~~
joeblau
That just may be worth it :).

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

Seems more like a feature than a bug.

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sebazzz
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?

------
msiyer
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.

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

~~~
cube00
I'd be interested in the time between when I click 'delete' and the last bits
disappearing off a Facebook storage medium.

