Social media: sort out your mess

Your first instinct may be to start going through every post that appears, but thankfully there’s an easier way

From your profile page, click the Activity Log button on your cover photo. This view will show not only your posts but every single one of your actions on Facebook, including posts you’re tagged in and even random comments, pictures and pages you’ve liked. You can also view posts by year or search for keywords (such as “office Christmas party”).

If the post wasn’t shared by you, you won’t be able to remove it. But if you’re tagged in it, you have three options: Hide it from your timeline (click the dropdown arrow under the poster’s name and select the option). The post will no longer be visible to your friends – unless they’re friends with the person who originally posted it.

Remove the tag so your profile will no longer be connected to the post. To do this, hover over your name and choose Remove Tag.

Flag the post. Click on Options (the three dots on the top right) > Give Feedback on this Photo and select the appropriate comment.

If Facebook reviews the content and finds no problems with it, your only other option is to ask the poster to remove it. For future posts Turn on Facebook’s builtin Timeline Review. Turning on this feature means no post you’re tagged in will become visible to your friends until you approve it.

You’ll find the function in the Activity Log section. To activate it, click on the gear icon on the top right of the window and select Enabled in the drop-down menu. Good to know If you want to delete your Facebook account but don’t want to lose all your pictures, videos and memories, you can download them all in a few clicks.

Go to Settings > General. Click on the Go to Your Facebook Information link at the top of the window, and click Download Your Information, which includes the pages you’ve liked and the advertising you’ve responded to.

The information will download as a zip file and you’ll be able to choose which folder on your computer you’d like to save it to.

Once it’s downloaded, right click on it and select Extract All.

This will unzip the file, creating a new Facebook folder in the same place, which you can now open.

The subfolders inside will reflect what you chose to download from Facebook.

You’ll find your photos inside the Photos and Videos subfolder.