It's now much harder to see if someone edited a Facebook post
Have you ever made a cringeworthy mistake in a Facebook post? Don't lie, the answer is yes.
If you have a sense of shame, Facebook at least allows you to go back and correct your gaffe by editing the post, a feature that certain other social media networks still haven't added.
But evidence of your slip-up lived on with the tiny "Edited" label on the bottom of the post, signaling to your followers that you cared just enough to correct yourself on the internet. Sad.
Apparently, however, that's no longer the case. It seems that Facebook has removed the on-post edited label, making it much more difficult to know when someone actually took the time to fix their mistake.
In order to actually know whether or not your eyes were playing tricks on you when a friend's rant no longer has 15 spelling errors the second time you see it, you'll need to do some digging. Here's how the new editing looks, courtesy of my colleague Raymond Wong and his doubts about how cool the upcoming Nintendo Switch actually is.
Original Post
His original post simply shared a link.
Edited Post
I noticed that he added a comment about the Switch, so I checked out the post information, via the drop-down menu. To see what happened, I have to view the edit history.
Check out the edit history
When I look at his edit history, I can see all the changes that were made.
In most cases, this type of editing isn't a big deal, but the move to hide post edit labels takes away one of the few features that provided any transparency for our online behavior. This raises one of the biggest ethical questions that has long plagued social media and the way we interact on the internet: Should we have the power to instantly, surreptitiously rewrite our wrongs to preserve our online image?
When asked about the change, Facebook reps acknowledged that this is a different editing system than it had before, but the change was made about a year ago. It appears that the rollout took some time to reach most users — or we just didn't notice when posts started changing without any acknowledgment.
(This story was updated to reflect Facebook's response about the change).
Topics Social Media
Brett Williams is a Tech Reporter at Mashable. He writes about tech news, trends and other tangentially related topics with a particular interest in wearables and exercise tech. Prior to Mashable, he wrote for Inked Magazine and Thrillist. Brett's work has also appeared on Fusion and AskMen, to name a few. You can follow Brett on Twitter @bdwilliams910.
