Facebook has been forced to deny reports that a bug was causing private messages to be republished in public.
Rumours emerged on Monday evening that private messages were being displayed on users' walls.
Numerous reports from France suggested that the old messages, usually from 2009, were viewable by all users.
But Facebook said on Tuesday that this was not the case, and explained the messages were just old wall messages which users had forgotten about and which appeared private.
Facebook said in a statement to Techrunch that they had "gone back and checked" and that every instance of a supposed private message appearing on a timeline was false.
Facebook said: "A lot of the confusion is because before 2009 there were no likes and no comments on wall posts. People went back and forth with wall posts instead of having a conversation."
The social network had previously said in a statement:
"A small number of users raised concerns after what they mistakenly believed to be private messages appeared on their Timeline. Our engineers investigated these reports and found that the messages were older wall posts that had always been visible on the users' profile pages. Facebook is satisfied that there has been no breach of user privacy."
For tips on how to keep your personal data (and your reputation) safe on Facebook, flip through the gallery (below) to see some of the things you should never post publicly.
