awesome-archive / deletefb Goto Github PK

Why?

I needed a simple and reliable way to delete Facebook posts. There are third-party apps that claim to do this, but they all require handing over your credentials, or are unreliable in other ways. Since this uses Selenium, it is more reliable, as it uses your real web browser, and it is less likely Facebook will block or throttle you.

As for why you would want to do this in the first place. That is up to you. Personally I wanted a way to delete most of my content on Facebook without deleting my account.

Will this really delete posts?

I can make no guarantees that Facebook doesn't store the data somewhere forever in cold storage. However this tool is intended more as a way to clean up your online presence and not have to worry about what you wrote from years ago. Personally, I did this so I would feel less attached to my Facebook profile (and hence feel the need to use it less).

Installation

You have several options to run it.

1. Install from PyPI with pip install --user delete-facebook-posts
2. Clone this repo and run pip install --user . or do pip install --user git+https://github.com/weskerfoot/DeleteFB.git
3. Set up a Python virtualenv, activate it, and run pip install -r requirements.txt, then you can just run python deletefb/deletefb.py as you would if you had installed it from PyPI.

How To Use It

• Make sure that you have Google Chrome installed and that it is up to date
• Also install the chromedriver for Selenium. See here. On Arch Linux you can find this in the chromium package, and on Ubuntu it is chromium-chromedriver.
• Run deletefb -E "[email protected]" -P "yourfacebookpassword" -U "https://www.facebook.com/your.profile.url"
• The script will log into your Facebook account, go to your profile page, and start deleting posts. If it cannot delete something, then it will "hide" it from your timeline instead.
• Be patient as it will take a very long time, but it will eventually clear everything. You may safely minimize the chrome window without breaking it.

2FA

• If you have 2-Factor Auth configured then the script will pause for 20 seconds to allow you to enter your code and log in.

Headless mode

• The tool supports running Chrome in headless mode with the --headless option, which may be preferable if you plan on running it in the background.

How To Install Python

MacOS

See this link for instructions on installing with Brew.

Linux

Use your native package manager

Windows

See this link, but I make no guarantees that Selenium will actually work as I have not tested it.

Bugs

If it stops working or otherwise crashes, delete the latest post manually and start it again after waiting a minute. I make no guarantees that it will work perfectly for every profile. Please file an issue if you run into any problems.