Facebook API. Remove tags, wallposts, messages from a certain user

I开发者_运维问答'd like to remove as much as possible of my history with a certain facebook user via the Facebook API. I want to be able to remove photo tags, wallposts, messages that I am tagged in, or associated with the certain user.

Is this possible, and if yes; how?

Blocking the user will go a long way towards removing most connections with the person in quesion. Go to Account->Privacy Settings->Manage Block Lists, or go to the users profile and look for the "Report/Block" link under their friends/family lists.

This FAQ about blocking describes a little about what happens when you block someone. As far as photos goes, it's a little unclear:

Photos: If the blocked person tagged you in any photos before the block, you’ll still be able to see those photos. You might also see photos of the blocked person if they are tagged in another friend’s album, but you won’t be able to click on their name to see their profile.

You do automatically get un-tagged from all their photos when you block someone. I'm guessing wall posts you're tagged in are removed as well, although I only tested with photo tags.

As far as removing their posts to your wall, as Igy pointed out you can't write an app that uses the API to delete posts that it didn't create. So, what I would do is write an app that gets all the posts on your wall and filters them, something like this pseudo-code:

posts = api('/me/feed')
for each post in posts:
    if post.from.id == [blocked persons id]:
        output post.id

Post ID's from the Graph API are in the format USERID_POSTID, so there are two ID's separated by an underscore. So for each ID in the output, go to https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=[POSTID]&id=[USERID] and manually delete the post by selecting "Remove post" from the little gear menu on the top right of the post. Use the paging data from your API request, or until and since parameters (which are just UNIX timestamps, or any string accepted by the strtotime function), as described on http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/ under "Paging", to get all posts going back until the beginning of your wall.

If you are wanting to automate this process to make it available to end users and not just yourself, there are technically several ways you could go about it, although they may or may not violate (Terms of use)[http://www.facebook.com/terms.php]:

[3.2] You will not collect users' content or information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.

I'm sure there are ways of implementing such an app that doesn't violate these terms, for example providing a link to the post so that they can delete it themselves, rather than automatically deleting them.

http://suicidemachine.org/

I'd look into their code.

From their FAQ on if you can make your own: Theoretically yes! Practically no (or let's say, not yet)! You'd need a Linux WebServer (apache2) with perl and python modules (php should be installed as well). Further, you'll need VNC-server and Java packages by Sun to launch selenium-remote applets. If you feel like contributing and can convince us with decent programming skills, please get in contact with us via email. We don't make the source code publicly available, since Facebook, Twitter, Myspace and LinkedIn would figure out how the suicidemachine is working in detail! So, please do not contact us, if you work for one of these companies!

I'm not even sure (personally) why you'd want to do this, surely you'd either want to block the other user or just remove them as a friend, but to answer your question:

It's not possible to delete most types of content via the API unless the App ID you're using was the original creator of that content (e.g an app for posting to your wall can delete the posts it made, but not posts made by other apps or on the Facebook.com interface)

Check the documentation at http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/api/ - you can definitely remove likes and comments of photos and wall posts - there may be other ways to do this (e.g retroactively changing your RSVP status to an event both users went to)