The ethics of unfriending

Some more musings on Facebook, this time the ethics of unfriending and when it is acceptable to remove someone from your friend list, an action that can easily cause offence and awkwardness if not handled properly. I have recently been suffering fairly regular unfriendings by people I considered good friends and over the past few months have seen my friend count steadily decrease. Of course, a user is perfectly within their rights to control their friend list and unfriend anyone at any time, but these unfriendings often come completely out of the blue so why they have chosen to unfriend me is something I struggle to understand. Personally I consider unfriending someone to actually be quite rude and something only to be done with very good reason as there are plenty of alternatives.


Facebook doesn't normally notify you when you are unfriended, but you will probably notice that your friend count has gone down and this person has disappeared from your news feed. There are numerous applications available (including the one I use to clean up Facebook's hideous interface, the excellent FBPurity browser add-on) that will alert you when someone is no longer in your friend list. Sometimes this is because they have deactivated or deleted their account or you unfriended them yourself, which is fair enough, but too often I receive a surprise notification that someone I never expected to be unfriended by has done just that for reasons that aren't at all apparent to me.

Like everyone I suppose, I have various types of friend on Facebook, from family members and classmates down to acquaintances I don't see very often and occasionally exchange a few pleasantries with, and a handful of people I have never actually met in person but I am happy to be friends with as we share a common interest. It would be more understandable if the unfriendings were coming from people in the latter group, as such casual acquaintances with only a tenuous connection are usually the first to go during friend clearouts. That isn't what has been happening recently though: the casual acquaintances and the school friends I haven't spoken to for years seem happy to remain friends and the spate of unfriendings have come from the current part of my life, former students of my university who have left within the last couple of years, I know well in person and I considered to be proper friends.

Maybe it's just me, but I believe unfriending to be rude as it carries a strong implication that this person wants to cut me out of their life without even giving a reason, and behaving in a similar way in the real world would be socially unacceptable. Where unfollowing is quietly avoiding that person you aren't really that close to, unfriending is more like going up to them, telling them out of the blue "I don't want to be friends with you, don't contact me anymore" and then walking away without giving any explanation, which would be extremely rude and inappropriate. It is even more frustrating when it was the other party who sent me the friend request in the first place so there was a time they genuinely wanted to be friends with me and it makes me wonder what could have changed since then. If they don't like or don't want to see what I post, or don't want me seeing certain things they post, then there are many better and more polite ways to deal with this than unfriending me.

It is very easy to unfollow someone and hide all their posts from your news feed while remaining friends, and you can also hide certain posts you don't like, which will cause similar posts to automatically be hidden in future. Facebook provides methods of creating friend groups and hiding certain content from them: by default there is a 'Restricted' group and any friends you place in this will only see your public content, but you can also create custom groups, for instance you can have a 'close friends' group and share more personal things with only this group while hiding them from more distant friends. Unfollowing is my preferred method to deal with those friends I don't want to see in my news feed but I do still want to keep in touch with, and is invisible to the other party so they won't even know anything has changed. Isn't that much less rude and intrusive?

I will be selective when accepting friend requests, but it is very rare that I will unfriend anyone, and never without good reason, so once you're on my friends list I'm highly likely to keep you there. Unless they have actively done something to upset me and I no longer want to associate with them (which they would know about), I certainly wouldn't unfriend somebody I know in person. People drift apart, friendships come and go and some will reach a natural end, but that doesn't seem to be what is happening in these recent cases. I don't talk about religion or politics and try to avoid controversial or overly personal posts, so I'm pretty sure there is no way I could have intentionally upset them, and their mutual friend count doesn't decrease significantly so it doesn't seem as if they are having a mass clearout of friends from a certain part of their life, but they unfriend me while staying friends with most of our mutual friends they met under the same circumstances, which is frankly a bit bizarre.

In many of these cases, the users in question are former students of the university who have now graduated and moved elsewhere for work. Yes, there is a change of circumstances there as they are no longer at the university and we are now unlikely to regularly see each other in person, but my view is that this just strengthens the importance of social media as a means of keeping in touch and provides a very good reason NOT to unfriend your former classmates as you have lost the frequent personal interaction. We shared an environment and a bond for two years or more and always seemed to get along well, so why the unfriending now you have moved on to something else? Did knowing me while at university really mean that little to you? I may not comment or message very often, but I still take a keen interest in what my former classmates are doing with their lives and it pleases me to see them doing well, so to suddenly deny that interaction for no apparent reason could be quite upsetting.


I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that unfriending is too easy to do but can easily come as a shock and cause upset and offence, so you should think carefully before unfriending someone, especially if you know them in person. There are plenty of more polite alternatives that allow you to reduce your interaction with a friend without the potentially hurt feelings of unfriending them, and it should be the act of last resort if you are absolutely certain you no longer feel able to be friends with them. If you do decide to unfriend someone, that person used to be your friend so is it too much to ask for you to at least do them the courtesy of writing a short polite private message explaining why your friendship has come to an end?