The Facebook deletion process used to take 14 days, but the company has now extended it to 30 days, The Verge reports. The 16-day increase will supposedly give users additional time to rethink this change and perhaps leave their Facebook account open instead.
A Facebook spokesperson told The Verge that this change was made because many people were trying to log back into their accounts after the Facebook deletion process ended. However, the company didn’t reveal the percentage of users who did this after permanently deleting their accounts.
“We recently increased the grace period when you choose to delete your Facebook account from 14 days to 30 days,” a Facebook spokesperson told the tech news blog. “We’ve seen people try to log in to accounts they’ve opted to delete after the 14-day period. The increase gives people more time to make a fully informed choice.”
Is this really the reason Facebook extended its account deletion process? Perhaps users are simply getting tired of the social network and want to leave it, so more users than ever before may be deleting their Facebook accounts. As a result, the social network could be trying to implement new methods to stop the flow of people leaving.
The movement #deletefacebook could be responsible for that outflow. WhatsApp co-founder Brian Action encouraged nearly 43,000 followers on Twitter to delete Facebook in March.
It is time. #deletefacebook
— Brian Acton (@brianacton) March 20, 2018
However, Facebook’s last earnings report doesn’t make it look like people are really leaving or trying to delete their accounts. According to the release, the number of daily active users in the U.S. and Canada remained flat year over year. In fact, the number of active users in Asia increased. The number of daily active users in Europe declined by 4 million, but Facebook executives justified that by saying it was due to the General Data Protection Regulation.
We’ll have to wait until the next earnings report, which is scheduled for release on Oct. 30, to find out if the number of daily active users changed, especially now that the Facebook deletion process has been extended.
Perhaps the more reasonable action for many users would be to only deactivate their account by going to Account Settings. There are plenty of reasons you may want to deactivate your account and not let Facebook log you back in for seven days. Still, it’s up to each user to decide whether they are persistent enough to not log back in and re-enable it after deactivating it. Nevertheless, even if you don’t end up permanently deleting your Facebook account, it’s good that Facebook allows you to take a 30-day break from it, especially for students who often scroll through their Facebook and Instagram feeds instead of studying.
