How To Stop Facebook Graph Search From Displaying Your Old Posts To The Public

Facebook Graph Search on Tuesday began offering public search results for every single check-in, status update, or note users have ever added to their Facebook accounts. Many users for employment and personal reasons may not want their entire Facebook history to be fully searchable and for that reason we have a guide for turning off Facebook Graph Search for your past activity.

The first thing you need to do is head over to your Facebook homepage and click on the little “Lock” feature for your privacy settings:

After you click on SEE MORE SETTINGS you should see a new feature titled Limit Past Posts:

Clicking on the Limit Past Posts feature will show users a new message that reads:

“If you use this tool, content on your timeline you’ve shared with friends of friends or Public will change to Friends. Remember: people who are tagged and their friends may see those posts as well.

You also have the option to individually change the audience of your posts. Just go to the post you want to change and choose a different audience.

Learn about changing old posts.”

Here’s a screenshot of the Facebook warning:

After you click the Limit Old Posts button a pop up box will appear, simply click on the confirm option:

Facebook then confirms one final time that “The audience for the selected content has been changed.”

Your old Facebook posts are now hidden from non-Facebook friends. If you want to protect your Facebook Social Graph search results from friends you’ll have to visit each of your old posts and delete them manually:

If you don’t want to remove your old Facebook posts you can also set them to “Only Me” or restrict their search results using the “custom” feature via the post page:

If you are still pretty new to Facebook there is a simple solution that can protect your future posts from outside prying eyes. Just set your posts to “Friends” only or to other custom choices. In the “Status Update” window just click on the “Friends” or “Public” update that shows below the “What’s on your mind?” wording. Keep in mind that the option will only show after you click inside the status update window.

Set your posts to “Friends” and they will be hidden from the public.

Those are the easy steps that you can take to prevent old posts from showing up in Facebook social graph searches.

If you have any questions or need help with this process feel free to use our Twitter help channel @SNDHelp.