Facebook is able to remove Mark Zuckerberg's messages from other users' inboxes — something the rest of us can't do

Facebook messages that Mark Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives sent to other users on the social network were recently found to be deleted from those user's inboxes, according to a report in TechCrunch Friday.

Three unnamed sources speaking to TechCrunch said that messages they had previously received from Zuckerberg were no longer in their inboxes, though the messages they sent to Zuckerberg remained.

Facebook doesn't allow users to delete messages from a recipients inbox, which suggests that Zuckerberg has special treatment on the social network. The company told TechCrunch that the ability to retract Zuckerberg's messages was instituted for legal compliance after Sony Pictures' emails were hacked in 2014.

Facebook didn't immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.

CNBC recently explained how to download all of your private data from Facebook, and that data includes old chat messages that you might have exchanged with other users on Facebook. It typically appears as a two-way conversation with messages from both parties. In this instance, TechCrunch said that Zuckerberg's messages don't appear at all, even in the downloaded logs.

Zuckerberg has previously had access to features that weren't available to some users. Until last year, other users on Facebook weren't able to block him, for example. He was also scrutinized for comments he made while at Harvard, when he messaged a friend that users who trusted him with their data were "dumb f****."

But Facebook's treatment of user data has seen a fresh wave of criticism as millions of consumers have been told they can assume some personal data has been scraped from their profiles.

Read the full TechCrunch story here.

-- Anita Balakrishnan contributed to this report.

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