telegram

How to unsend a message in Telegram

In the past, sending text messages by mistake would cause huge embarrassment for either or both parties involved. Thankfully, these days pretty much all messenger platforms allow users to unsend a message, and Telegram is no different.

Telegram introduced the ability to delete messages a few years ago, but back then, users only had a 48 hour window to delete their message, meaning that anything older and they would not be able to.

The company has since made improvements where you can delete a message regardless of when it was sent, and it will also apply to the person who received it. This means that if you’re scrolling through your chat history and find something embarrassing or cringey that you’d rather not see anymore, you can get rid of it with a couple of taps.

Delete messages on Telegram

  1. Launch Telegram
  2. Open the chat where the message you want to delete is in
  3. Tap and hold on the message
  4. Tap “Delete”
  5. Select “Delete for me and <username>”

This will delete a message for both you and the participant in the chat. According to Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov:

“An old message you already forgot about can be taken out of context and used against you decades later. A hasty text you sent to a girlfriend in school can come haunt you in 2030 when you decide to run for mayor. We have to admit: Despite all of our progress in encryption and privacy, we have very little actual control of our data. We can’t go back in time and erase things for other people.”

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