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How to Clean Up Your Facebook Account

It’s good practice to do a little sweep of Facebook every few years and get rid of stuff that maybe shouldn’t be there. Things you regret, things that might not look great to employers, things that reveal too much—you get the idea. Here’s how. 

Start By Editing Your Profile

Go to your profile and select Edit Profile. Your profile has multiple components like Overview, Work and Education, Places You’ve Lived, etc. These are listed on the left side of the screen. Click on each section and review the information. Cull everything non-essential. Remember, personal information like your hometown or high school can be used to guess passwords or answer security questions. If there’s no good reason for the information to be there, delete it. 

Review Friends 

Next, click on the Friends tab. In general, Facebook will show you the people you contact the most often up top. So scroll right down to the bottom. Here are all the people you contact least. Think about defriending people you no longer speak to, no longer want to speak to, or who shouldn’t have a close eye on your life. 

Remember, your Facebook friends can see more about you than a random Facebook user. If said friend is just a co-worker from three jobs ago or your little brother’s university roommate, do you really want them to know much about what’s going on in your life now? If it helps, think of this as de-cluttering your friend list. 

Photos & Videos

You probably know what photos you should remove. So here’s how. Move your cursor over the photo. An Edit button will appear in the top right corner. If you uploaded the photo, you can delete it. Remember to back it up first, if you’d like to keep it for posterity but just don’t want it public. If it’s someone else’s photo, you can untag yourself by clicking the Remove Tag option at the bottom of the dropdown menu. You may also choose to Hide From Timeline. You could consider messaging the person who owns the photo and asking them to take it down. If it’s a good friend or if the behaviour pictured is particularly egregious or embarrassing, this may be the best option. 

Here’s one final thing to think about. If you have kids, no doubt there are plenty of baby pictures. Or toddler pictures. Or videos of your seven-year-old dancing at birthday parties. If your kids are getting older, particularly if they’re becoming tweens or teens, maybe take some of their pictures down. As kids get older they want more control over their own identity, and that’s okay. It’s hard to look cool in grade seven if everyone’s seen your potty training pictures. 

The More Tab

The More tab is full of sports teams, TV shows, movies, and all kinds of pages. Take a minute to cull anything you no longer want to be associated with or remove yourself from pages and groups that post stuff you don’t want in your timeline. 

Timeline

For a truly deep clean of your Facebook, you’ll have to scroll through your timeline. Want to clean up old status updates, shared links, and whatnot? This is where you can do it. Click on your timeline and start scrolling down. To delete a post, look for the ellipsis symbol (three horizontal dots) at the top right of the post. Here you can delete your post (or hide it, change the date, turn off notifications, and more). 

Facebook has endless scrolling, so you can just keep scrolling down, looking through posts until you get to the very beginning. If you’re being really thorough, this can take some time, so maybe turn on Netflix while you do this. 

The Bottom Line

Facebook and other social media you share is a reflection of you. But people change. We enter new social circles, gain new responsibilities, start new jobs, build new additions to our families, and so much more. When that happens and our old social media starts to look a little dated, immature, indiscreet, or otherwise out of step with who we are now, it’s time to clean it up. Sure, the future comes with some weird chores. But as with most chores, it’s best to do it now so you don’t regret it later.