Digging deeper into Facebook's core history will be much more difficult now ever since the social networking giant "mistakenly" deleted some of Mark Zuckerberg's old posts.
On March 30, Business Insider reported that some of the crucial posts in Zuckerberg's profile regarding company acquisitions, which were previously public, have now disappeared, including posts from 2007 and 2008.
In a statement, a spokesperson from Facebook said some of the 34-year-old chief executive's posts were deleted a few years ago due to "technical errors."
These posts were not restored because the work needed to do so was allegedly "extensive and not guaranteed to be successful."
When asked about the full extent of the deletion, the spokesperson said they did not know how many posts in total were deleted.
Furthermore, the spokesperson said information about past announcements and company news have been archived publicly on the Facebook blog and on Newsroom, a repository of old blog posts and announcements.
Missing Facebook Posts
Meanwhile, Tech Times checked out Zuckerberg's timeline and confirmed that the posts from 2007 and 2008 have vanished. If users try to search for the year 2008 or 2007, only the posts from 2006 will be shown.
One of the missing Facebook posts was about the death of Josef Desimone, the company's head chef who died in a motorcycle accident in 2013.
Another missing post was about News Feed, which was launched by Facebook in 2006. Zuckerberg had a blog post that attempted to quash backlash against News Feed, and this blog post was entitled "Calm down. Breathe. We hear you."
Technically, past announcements can still be found, but what Facebook does is redirect users to Newsroom, which contains an incomplete archive of posts.
To reach specific blog posts, users must know specific keywords and search for it on Google or scroll through thousands of Facebook's posts over the years.
Ultimately, the effect of the disappearance of Zuckerberg's posts is to make the company's records more obscure and more difficult to track than ever before.
This isn't the first time Facebook deleted some of Zuckerberg's posts. In November 2016, public posts about the media on his account, as well as posts about the role of Facebook in the elections, all disappeared and were deleted.
A spokesperson told The Verge that the removal was "an accident" and then restored those posts back to public.
Crucial Acquisitions And Future Plans
Some missing posts were about Facebook's acquisition of Instagram in 2012. News reports linked a post from Zuckerberg's profile back then, but now the post has become inaccessible.
In previous posts, Facebook announced that it was committed to building Instagram more "independently," but the source to prove this has now disappeared.
Such posts are crucial, as Facebook has gotten more involved in how Instagram is run. For instance, a reverse-engineering specialist dished out the news that the photo-sharing app is testing direct messaging for the web.
This comes on the heels of reports that Facebook plans to create an inter-application messaging system for Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, which will be the first of its kind.
In fact, all these apps would receive end-to-end encryption should this plan be set into motion.
In early January, however, Facebook said the unified messaging application won't arrive anytime soon. Zuckerberg said the company is still thinking through how to go about with the integration.
"There's a lot more we need to figure out," said Zuckerberg.
Brian Solis | Flickr
