> Since they store edit history, too, replacing it with other text would simply be an indication that you’re trying to cover it up.

It's text you wrote, why would there be any problem "covering up" your own text?

Note that, I'm not arguing you should have a right to use Selenium to scrape their site and replace the text, but if you went through every post in a non-automated fashion and changed the text, from a perspective of "covering up" the text, the purpose would be the same. Facebook almost certainly has an interest in keeping 100M users from scraping with Selenium, that's a separate thing entirely.

If you’re trying to hide the content from someone who has access to the edit history, editing it is ineffective and simply shows that you wish for it to be hidden. When would this be an issue? In court.

It’s true that editing could serve to hide it from other users, but privacy settings could do that also.

I'm still not following -- in court for what?

This is information that you originally put out, wrote down on Facebook, so it's not that you're hiding something you didn't want anyone to know originally. If it was libelous or something so you wanted to delete it after the fact, it's still likely possible to get it back -- even if Facebook deleted the actual message in the database, there's likely a number of methods -- server logs, db logs, cached resources, db backups, or even a simple screenshot -- that would likely be sufficient proof.

Plenty of people post things that they shouldn't have and regret. It could be plainly incriminating, like when people ill-advisedly make a post essentially admitting to a crime, threatening someone, or discussing events related to a lawsuit in public. It's possible deleting or obscuring such a post could even be construed to be destruction of evidence.

http://www.wassom.com/delete-at-your-own-risk-spoliation-of-...

As far as the rest of your post, i believe that is exactly what I was asserting originally.

Point being, the ability to edit and view edit history changes very little with regard to the courts. Instead of needing to present Facebook with a subpoena for information from e.g. logs, you're able to simply view history. It doesn't change anything whether you can delete the data or "delete" the data, it just changes how accessible it is.