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Facebook Timeline is the profile area where your posts and some posts involving you may appear. To manage it, keep three controls distinct: the audience for the original post, whether a tagged post is added to your profile, and who may see that tagged post. You can review older activity in Activity Log. Facebook’s help pages describe these controls, but menu labels and availability can vary by profile type and device.

What is Facebook Timeline?

Timeline is part of your personal Facebook profile. It can show things you post and posts in which other people tag you. A Timeline is not the same as a Facebook Page: this guide covers personal profiles, not Page publishing or administration.

Three separate questions determine what happens to a post involving you:

  • Who can see the original post? The person who publishes it selects its audience.
  • Does it appear on your profile? Profile and tagging controls, including Timeline Review where available, can let you review whether certain tagged posts appear on your Timeline.
  • Who can see a post that tags you? Its visibility can depend on the poster’s selected audience and the audience set in your Profile and tagging settings.

Changing whether a post appears on your profile is not the same as deleting the original post or changing the original poster’s audience.

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How do I control who sees posts on my profile?

Choose an audience when you publish

Facebook’s instructions describe creating a post from Feed, adding text or another type of content, selecting an audience, and publishing. Available post types include photos and videos, check-ins, tags, feelings or activities, GIFs, and Live Video. A Life Event can be added from your Timeline.

  1. Open Feed and start a post.
  2. Add your text or other content.
  3. Use the audience selector to choose who can see the post.
  4. Publish the post.

The audience selector controls the post’s visibility; it does not decide whether a separate post by someone else is added to your profile. See Facebook’s instructions for sharing something on Facebook and its guidance on sharing and managing posts on your profile.

Find profile and tagging controls

Facebook places privacy options under Settings & privacy, with Profile and tagging settings among the controls relevant to profile posts. The precise menu path and available options may vary by device and profile type. Facebook also says current profile and cover photos are public; do not assume the audience setting for an ordinary post makes those photos private. See Facebook’s privacy settings guidance and privacy troubleshooting help.

What happens when someone tags you?

A tag links to a person’s profile, may cause the post to appear on that person’s Timeline, and notifies the tagged person, according to Facebook’s tagging guidance. Tagging therefore affects both the connection to your profile and potentially the post’s reach—but it does not transfer ownership of the original post to you.

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Facebook says the audience for a post that tags you may include the audience selected by the person who posted it and the audience chosen in your Profile and tagging settings. The help page describes Friends as the default for the tagged person’s setting. The combined visibility should not be confused with the question of whether the item appears on your Timeline.

How do I review posts I’m tagged in?

Timeline Review can let you decide whether certain tagged posts appear on your profile. Review is a profile-display control: declining to add a tagged post to your Timeline does not, by itself, delete the post or establish that it is hidden from the poster’s audience or elsewhere on Facebook.

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  1. Open Settings & privacy, then look for Profile and tagging settings.
  2. Find the Timeline Review control, if it is available for your profile.
  3. Review pending tagged posts and choose whether to allow them on your profile.

Facebook’s profile-post help and tagging help explain related controls. If you cannot find the same labels, availability or wording may differ for your device or profile.

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How can I find older Facebook activity?

Activity Log is the account-holder’s private review area for activity on Facebook. Facebook describes it this way: “Your activity log lets you review and manage what you’ve shared on Facebook.” Some stories listed there may still appear on your Timeline, in search, or in friends’ Feeds; the log’s private visibility does not make each activity item private.

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Use Activity Log and its Manage activity options to look through posts and other actions, including comments and likes. Facebook’s help says the tools can support archiving or deleting content. Treat those as different choices: hiding an item from your profile and deleting it are not interchangeable. Check the action’s description in the current interface before confirming it.

Start at Facebook’s Activity Log help. The page about accessing or downloading information about activity in Facebook groups concerns group activity specifically, rather than a general profile Timeline archive.

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