Facebook is to allow users to clean up their profiles by hiding posts and photographs dating from when they were teenagers or at university amid fears it could hinder their future job prospects.

The social network said it had added the feature because “we know things change in people’s lives” and that it wished to make it easier for people to “accurately reflect” who they were in the present. It said the public would be able to use the “Manage Activity” tool to search their posts by year or person, and delete or archive those posts in bulk.

If users archive posts, they will not just be hidden from timelines, as they are with the current “Hide” feature, but from across Facebook as a whole, regardless of where it was posted or who was tagged in it.

It said， “Whether you’re entering the job market after college or moving on from an old relationship, we know things change in people’s lives, and we want to make it easy for you to curate your presence on Facebook to more accurately reflect who you are today.”

Such tools could prove useful to those looking to clean up their social media presence ahead of job interviews by making it impossible to find old posts of parties, nights out or fancy dress that could show them in a negative light.

However, the move may cause some concern that Facebook is allowing people to whitewash their history, making it more difficult for people to search through posts for evidence of damaging comments.

Over the past few years, it has become relatively easy to trawl through old posts, with the company in 2015 introducing a new indexing tool, by which users could search for terms such as “posts about drunk” and bring up lists of someone’s historic posts. This has led to revelations over a number of high-profile figures, who have faced criticism over comments they had made on Facebook in the past.

British-Pakistani MP Naz Shah, for example, was briefly suspended from the Labour Party in 2016 after it emerged she had shared a Facebook post which suggested that Israel’s population should be “transported” out of the Middle East to the United States. She later admitted the comments in the post were anti-semitic.

Words to Learn 相关词汇

【粉饰】 fěnshì whitewash cover up or gloss over the faults or errors of, absolve from blame

【搜罗】sōuluó trawl make a search as if by trawling

社交网络脸书将允许用户清理自己的个人资料，将青少年或大学时期上传的一些可能会阻碍求职前程的帖子和照片隐藏起来。

脸书表示，增加这一功能是因为 “我们知道人生会发生改变”，希望能有助于人们“准确地反映出”自己现在是个什么样的人。脸书称，公众可以运用“管理活动”工具，按年份或人物来搜索帖子，批量删除帖子或将其存档。

如果用户将帖子存档，它们不仅会在时间轴中被隐藏（这是现有的“隐藏”功能可以做到的），而且脸书网站上的所有人都看不到，无论帖子发在哪里或标记了什么人。

脸书称：“无论你是大学毕业后进入职场，还是从一段旧恋情中走出来，我们知道人的生活会发生改变，我们希望这能有助于人们管理自己在脸书上的资料，使其更准确地反映出你现在的面貌。”

这样的工具对于那些想在求职面试前清理社交媒体痕迹的人来说会很有用，可以让别人无法找到对自己形象不利的派对、夜生活或奇装异服的老帖子。

然而，脸书允许人们洗白过去的这一举动可能会引发某些人的担忧，这样一来人们就更难以通过搜索帖子找到破坏性言论的证据。

在过去几年，搜寻旧帖子还是相对容易的，因为脸书公司在2015年推出了一个新的索引工具，用户可以用该工具来搜索“关于酗酒的帖子”等关键词，就能查到某人的一堆陈年老帖子。这导致多位知名人物的“黑历史”被翻出来，他们因为过去在脸书上发表过的言论而受到批评。

比如，英国巴基斯坦裔议员纳

兹▪莎在被人翻出她曾经分享过一个暗示以色列人口应该从中东“运到”美国的脸书帖子以后，曾在2016年被工党临时停职。她后来承认帖子里的言论是反犹的。(chinadaily.com.cn)