How to Copy Facebook Comments — One Comment or Every Comment at Once (2026)

Learning how to copy Facebook comments is easy for one comment and surprisingly awkward for a whole thread. Press and hold in the app, tap Copy, done. But the moment you need forty comments for a report, every entry on a contest post, or a complete record of a complaint thread before it is deleted, the manual route turns into an afternoon of scrolling, expanding and pasting. This guide covers both: the quick ways to copy a single comment on your phone and on a computer, why some comments never show up on screen, and how to copy every comment on a post at once into a spreadsheet, a document or ChatGPT.

Copying a single comment in the Facebook app

On Android and iPhone the app does not let you drag across comment text the way you would on a web page. Instead it has a press-and-hold menu:

1. Open the post and scroll to the comment.
2. Press and hold the comment bubble (not the name or the profile picture) until a menu slides up.
3. Tap Copy. The full comment text is on your clipboard.
4. Paste it into Notes, a message, an email or a spreadsheet cell.

A few things to know. The menu copies the whole comment, not part of it, so if you only want a sentence you will trim it after pasting. It copies the text only, not the commenter's name or the time it was posted, so note those separately if you need them. And the menu's contents change between app versions, devices and post types; if Copy is not there, open the same post in your phone's browser and use the highlight method below.

Copying a comment on facebook.com in a browser

On a computer, comments are ordinary text, so you can select them with the mouse:

1. Find the comment. If it ends in See more, click that first, because only the visible part gets copied.
2. Click just before the first word and drag to the last one.
3. Press Ctrl+C on Windows or Cmd+C on Mac.

Selecting is fiddly in practice. Drag a little too far and you pick up the commenter's name, the "Like · Reply" links and the timestamp. Drag across two comments and you get the reply counters and reaction icons in between. When you paste into a spreadsheet, that clutter often lands in separate cells and has to be cleaned out by hand. For one comment it is a minor annoyance; for thirty it is the job.

Why the comment you want isn't on screen

The most common complaint we hear is not "I can't copy it" but "I can't find it." Facebook does not show a busy thread in full by default. Above the comments there is a filter, usually set to Most relevant. Facebook's own Help Center explains that "Most relevant" ranks comments so the ones it considers most meaningful appear first, and that some comments, such as those its systems flag as possible spam, may be filtered out of that view. Meta describes the wider ranking approach in its Feed ranking explanation.

To see everything a public visitor can see:

• Click the filter and choose All comments (the wording can vary slightly by version, but there is usually an option that shows every comment, newest first).
• Click View more comments repeatedly until it disappears. Facebook loads the thread in batches.
• Click every View replies link. Replies are collapsed under their parent comment until you open them.

Only after all three steps is the comment you are looking for actually on the page. On a post with a few thousand comments, that can mean hundreds of clicks before you copy a single word.

The point where copying by hand stops working

Copying one comment is a thirty-second job. Copying a thread breaks down for reasons that have nothing to do with patience:

• Lazy loading. Comments arrive in batches as you click and scroll. Long threads become heavy pages, the browser slows, and on some posts earlier batches unload or the page jumps back to the top.
• Nested replies. A reply can answer another reply. Once pasted, nothing tells you which comment it was answering, so the conversation turns into a flat list of out-of-context lines.
• Truncation. Every long comment hides behind its own See more. Miss one and you have half a comment.
• Translations. Facebook may offer a translated version of comments in other languages. Copy after clicking "See translation" and you may paste the translation, not what the person actually wrote.
• Emoji and scripts. Emoji, Thai, Arabic or Devanagari text can paste as boxes or question marks depending on where it goes, especially in older spreadsheet software.
• No metadata. You get words without the name, the time, the reaction count or the reply count, which are exactly the fields a report or a contest draw needs.

Somewhere around the tenth comment, copying stops being the right tool. What you want instead is the whole thread as data.

Copying every comment at once: the export route

Facebook has no "select all comments" button, so copying a full thread means downloading it. With ZocialComment that is three steps:

1. Copy the post link. Use the post's Share menu and choose "Copy link", or copy the address bar on desktop. The Facebook comment exporter accepts public Page posts, public group posts, videos, Reels, /watch/?v= links, photo links, permalink.php and story.php links, facebook.com/share/… links, m.facebook.com links and fb.watch short links.
2. Paste it and start the export. The comment count appears first, then the comments are read in the background, so there is nothing to click through and no "View more comments" to babysit.
3. Download. Pick CSV for Sheets and most tools, Excel (.xlsx) for Excel itself, or JSON if a developer or a script will read it.

The first 100 comments on any post are free, with no signup. Bigger threads are a one-time payment, never a subscription (see pricing), and paid users can paste up to 20 links at once to copy several posts in one go. The export reads the post as a public visitor would, so private profiles and private groups are out of reach, by design.

What each row of the file holds

Every comment is one row. The first columns are the same on every platform we support, which makes it easy to stack a Facebook file next to an Instagram or TikTok one:

• author and username: the commenter's display name and short name.
• text: the comment exactly as written, with emoji and original language intact.
• likes: the number of Like reactions on the comment.
• replies: how many replies it received.
• created_at: when it was posted.
• id and reply_to_id: the comment's own ID and, for a reply, the ID of the comment it answers.
• avatar_url: a link to the profile picture.

After those come the Facebook-only columns: reaction_count (all reactions together) and one column per reaction type, reactions_love, reactions_haha, reactions_wow, reactions_sad, reactions_anger and reactions_care, plus author_id. Splitting reactions matters on Facebook: a comment with 200 reactions might be 190 "haha", which says something very different from 190 "angry".

On a paid export you can also include replies. Each reply becomes its own row, and replies to replies are flattened into the same list with reply_to_id pointing to the direct parent, so the shape of every conversation survives the copy. Sort by reply_to_id and the threads line up under the comments that started them.

Pasting the comments into Sheets, Docs or ChatGPT

Once the thread is a file, "copy and paste" becomes a few clicks:

Google Sheets

Open a blank sheet, choose File → Import → Upload and pick the CSV. Google documents the options in its import data sets guide; "Replace spreadsheet" and automatic separator detection work fine. From there you can filter by keyword, sort by likes, or use =COUNTIF(C:C,"*refund*") to count how many comments mention a word. Our Facebook comments to Google Sheets guide goes further.

Excel

Download the .xlsx version and open it directly, or import the CSV through Data → From Text/CSV and choose UTF-8 so emoji and accented letters display correctly.

Google Docs or Word

For a document, copy the author and text columns from the spreadsheet and paste them into Docs; they arrive as a clean two-column table. Filter first if you only want, say, comments with more than ten likes, and you get a ready-made "top comments" appendix for a report.

ChatGPT and other assistants

Pasting a handful of comments into a chat works. For a full thread, upload the CSV instead, because long pastes get cut off and you lose the reaction counts. Then ask for the recurring questions, the main complaints, or a short summary per theme. Keep the file as your source of truth and spot-check a few quotes against it, since assistants sometimes paraphrase.

What copying hundreds of Facebook threads has shown us

I run ZocialComment, and this guide is written from operating the Facebook exporter, not from a feature list. A few things we see again and again:

• The badge and the file rarely match exactly. The comment count Facebook shows on a post includes replies and can include comments that are hidden, filtered or deleted. On one post we checked, the badge read 331 while the top-level comments numbered 129; the other 202 were replies. That is why replies are a separate option and why a short file is usually Facebook's count, not missing data. Including replies closes most of the gap.
• "Most relevant" hides more than people expect. When a file contains comments someone could not find on the post, the default filter is the usual reason. Switching to "All comments" makes them appear on Facebook too.
• Reactions beat text for a quick read. On busy Page posts the split between "haha", "love" and "angry" on comments gives a mood check before anyone reads a word, which is why we keep each reaction in its own column instead of one total.
• Contest hosts are the heaviest copiers. Many Facebook exports are giveaway posts, where every comment is an entry and the host needs the names, not just the words. Manual copying is where entries go missing.

The column names, the 20-link paste and the first 100 comments with no signup are the live product values at the time of writing. For anything about how Facebook itself ranks or hides comments, Facebook's Help Center is the authority, and we link to it above rather than guess.

Copying comments you didn't write: the rules

Copying a public comment does not notify anyone: not the commenter, not the Page. Reading what is publicly visible is what Facebook is built for. What you do with the copy is where the rules live. Meta's Terms of Service govern use of the platform, and data-protection laws such as the GDPR treat names and profile links as personal data. In practice: use the file for reading, moderation, research or a fair contest draw; quote comments without names in public material; keep the file only as long as you need it; and never message people using details from it. Reply on Facebook, where everyone can see the answer.

Emoji are their own small rule: they are standard Unicode characters, so any modern tool that reads UTF-8 keeps them. If they break, the fix is the import setting, not the data.

Copy every comment on a Facebook post →

Related reading: how to export Facebook comments, Facebook comments to Google Sheets, downloading Facebook Reel comments.