5 Questions To Help You Clean Your Facebook Friends List

How many friends do you have on Facebook? I myself have 500 plus friends, which got me wondering if I really knew all of these people that are on my friends list. I know that it is a mix of professional and personal contacts but I am beginning to doubt if all of these are really my friends.

In the early days of Facebook, social media was fun and enjoyable. These days however, it has become overrun by trolls and hecklers and bullies, as well as fake news and hoaxes. I am seeing my news feed flooded by content I do not like, so I am taking it upon myself to clean up my friends list first and foremost. Here are five questions courtesy of Bit Rebels, that will guide me through the process of selecting who to unfriend.

1. Is the person someone you know?

When I started using Facebook, my first rule in accepting friends was it has to be someone I know or I have met more than once. The fact that my friends list is now over 500, this means that I broke my own rule at some point and accepted friends just because we have mutual friends. As I go through my list now, if I do not recognize the person, I will mark him or her to be unfriended.

2. Is the content they post relevant to you?

If you feel that what they post does not interest you in anyway, like reporting their hourly activities no matter how mundane, or posting countless selfies, or sharing links or posts that do not interest you, feel free to unfriend them. During the campaign period for example, I have unfriended quite a number of friends for sharing content that was baseless and untrue.

3. Do you share similar interests?

Some of the friends I have live outside of the Philippines, but Facebook has helped us reconnect and share stories and news about our personal lives. One favorite shared interest among my mommy friends are our children. Other shared interests include our high school alma mater and travel. Looking closely at my list again using this frame, I have to look at each friend and determine what interests connect us.

4. Have you interacted with this person in real life or online?

This is one sure way of eliminating friends who are not really your friends, but may only be a mutual acquaintance. My former batchmates from high school whom I have been interacting with online and offline will certainly pass. My former classmates from elementary may not be so lucky, unless they were my best friends or something.

5. Does this person continuously post cringe worthy content?

For me, the first reasons I usually consider unfriending someone is when they post content that has sexual content, nudity and violence and when they share fake or hoax news without checking the source. Political views I can still live with because they are entitled to their own opinion. But when you are spreading lies, that is unacceptable.

I hope these questions will enlighten you as you are doing some spring-cleaning of your Facebook friends list. It certainly narrows down my own criteria for taking people off my list, which I hope I can bring down to a more realistic number. If you are the type of person who hates unfriending, my only advice to you to restrict what this person sees, for your own privacy.