Mark Zuckerberg, the chairman, chief executive officer, and controlling shareholder of Meta Platforms (the parent company of Facebook and Instagram), has issued a fresh and direct warning to users of Facebook Messenger, urging them to exercise caution before taking screenshots of their private conversations. This message has garnered significant attention as it highlights Meta’s growing emphasis on user control and stringent privacy measures across its interconnected platforms, a topic of central importance to the company that began as a college project at Harvard.
Zuckerberg recently leveraged social media to remind users about a particular Messenger feature designed to enhance conversational privacy. While delivered in a lighthearted, even playful, tone, the core message carried a clear and unambiguous warning: screenshots of disappearing messages will no longer go unnoticed. Users engaging in this specific type of private chat will now receive an automatic notification instantly alerting them whenever another participant captures an image of a message that was explicitly intended to vanish.
The Evolution of Ephemeral Communication
This recent update on screenshot notifications is directly connected to a feature Meta initially introduced in 2020 known as Vanish Mode. Vanish Mode allowed users of both Facebook Messenger and Instagram to send temporary messages that were designed to automatically disappear forever as soon as the recipient viewed the content and subsequently exited the chat window.
The feature was originally conceptualized and implemented to give users a greater sense of freedom, enabling them to speak more spontaneously “in the moment” without the perennial worry about long-term privacy concerns or the digital footprint of casual conversation. At the time of its launch, Meta’s product managers explained that highly spontaneous, immediate conversations often require a more casual, less-permanent setting. Vanish Mode was positioned as the solution to this need, effectively removing the message from existence once it had served its temporary, immediate purpose.
The activation of Vanish Mode was intentionally simple: a user only had to swipe upward within an existing chat conversation to activate the ephemeral environment. Another upward swipe would quickly return the chat interface to its standard, permanent format. It initially debuted in the United States before expanding to several countries within the European Union. Bridget Pujals (Messenger Product Manager) and Manik Singh (Instagram features manager) emphasized upon its release that the mode was built entirely around the principles of safety and personal choice, aiming to grant users explicit control over how their conversations were stored and potentially shared.
The Shift to Disappearing Messages
Although Vanish Mode once held a prominent place in the Messenger interface, the Facebook Help Center now officially states that the original feature is no longer actively supported. In its place, Meta is actively and gradually rolling out a different system known as disappearing messages.
While these new disappearing messages function with a very similar intent and spirit to their predecessor, the rollout is proceeding slowly and the option may not yet be universally available for every single user. For those who do have access, the setting can typically be located by opening a chat, tapping the recipient’s name at the top of the screen, and scrolling down to the section labeled Privacy and Support. Within this menu, the option to turn on disappearing messages should be visible.
Meta’s official explanation is that this new feature serves the exact same purpose as Vanish Mode but operates with a clearer, more streamlined structure. Critically, the feature’s description now includes a prominent, explicit warning about the new screenshot notification alert. The system is engineered such that if anyone takes a screenshot or initiates a screen recording while the feature is active, an automated notification will instantly appear and be visible within the conversation thread to all participants.
This strict implementation aims to significantly bolster privacy assurance by guaranteeing that users are always fully aware when their supposedly short-lived, temporary messages are being preserved and recorded by someone else—eliminating the ambiguity and potential for non-consensual capture that existed before.
Zuckerberg himself chose to demonstrate the effectiveness of this new function through a playful, public interaction with his wife, Priscilla Chan. He shared a brief conversation in which he made a light-hearted joke, involving a hypothetical scenario with a supercomputer. Her subsequent response included a screenshot of the chat, and the instant notification immediately appeared within the thread, alerting him to the action. By posting this clear, real-world example to the public, Zuckerberg effectively illustrated exactly how the privacy feature works and simultaneously reminded the user base that private conversations are now governed by these new, mandatory layers of digital protection.
With these changes—from the original Vanish Mode to the more structured, notification-backed disappearing messages—Meta continues to signal its commitment toward a future where privacy controls are easier for users to manage, communication platforms feel inherently safer, and users retain greater, explicit control over the nature and permanence of their digital interactions.