To UnFriend or Not To UnFriend? That’s the Question!

Jan 19, 2011 by mandeewidrick

Some people are really cautious about who they add as a friend on Facebook. They’ve got all of their privacy settings locked down tight, and they only add immediate family or their closest friends.

Others are a bit more frivolous with their Facebook account and add “friends” that they haven’t actually met in person. This doesn’t necessarily make the person irresponsible with their account (though this could be the case), it usually just means they’re interested in getting outside of their normal circle and networking with others who share common interests. This is me, in a nutshell.

In dealing with complete strangers, sometimes you’re going to run into the occasional situation where you don’t want to maintain a connection with somebody. This could be for a variety of reasons…:

• After several months of being connected, you have yet to have a conversation.
• The person has been inactive on Facebook and probably won’t receive any messages/postings anyway.
• You’ve been getting spammed by the individual (business opportunities or games).
• They’re sending random hate mail to your inbox or posting on your wall.
• It’s apparent that the person is aimlessly adding huge quantities of friends with no contact.
• They’re just overall stalkerish.

At that point, it’s up to me to make a decision. Do I hide my wall from the individual? Do I simply unfriend? Do I all out BLOCK them so they can’t see anything from me anymore? I asked my Facebook friends what they thought:

“You can block people and I have. They can see no trace of you what so ever it is like you do not exist…..they do not exist to you either.” – Lori

“Depends. I usually just delete them if I don’t want them to see anything. But, facebook has the lovely new button where you can hide only select statuses and posts. I love that feature. Sometimes I just don’t want a select few people seeing something, and that makes it easier.” -Megan

“I’d unfriend them personally. What’s the point of being friends if they can’t even view any of your stuff. haha unless you want to keep spying on them.” -Dillon

“Create lists and send updates to the list that you know will be interested in the status update or content.” – Brandy

“If they totally creeped me out in some way…BLOCK. Otherwise, I don’t really think about it too much. If they’re spammy, I unfriend or hide their posts…kinda depends on if I know them IRL or not.” – Sarah

“Being largely ignorant of the finer techniques of FB, I make that decision when I friend them. ‘Is so-and-so going to want to see everything I put up?’ Same as ‘Don’t say anything in politics or business that you don’t want to see on the front page of the newspaper.’ ” -Gordon

How to hide your wall:

I have created a few lists where I place people that (1) are direct competitors, (2) I don’t know that well and probably wouldn’t do business with anyway or (3) I just feel like giving them limited access to my profile while I check out what they’re doing on their own profile (a.k.a. spying). These people cannot see my wall. Disclaimer: If you’re reading this and can’t see my wall, it’s nothing personal…or maybe it is…take it as you will. You may get wall privileges later, depending on who you are.

Many of these folks are on a list I have named “Limited Access”. After I first created the list, I had to go into my status update privacy settings as shown below:

Hint: If you don’t know where to find these settings, go to your status update bar and look for the little padlock icon and click it. Choose “Custom – Edit”. Select that option to open the window shown above.

From there, it’s easy to hide your wall from a list of people. Just type the name  of the list in the Hide this from box, and ta da! That whole list cannot see your wall, providing you also check Make this my default setting. If you don’t check this box, then all you’re hiding is that one status update.

How to unfriend:

If you want to unfriend someone and not worry about the hassle of hiding your wall from them, go to their profile, scroll down to the bottom on the left side of your screen, and look for this link.

How to block:

If someone REALLY makes you mad, and you want to prevent them from finding you on Facebook search or seeing your comments on your mutual friends’ profiles, just use the Report/Block This Person link as shown in the UnFriending screenshot above. (If you do this in a fit of rage and regret this later, you can always unblock them another time, just so you know. )