Facebook limited friends. What you need to know about restrictions on Facebook. Removal from readers
Why is Facebook chosen for communication and exchange of information by people of all ages, social status and degree of employment? There are many reasons, and one of the main ones is really thin privacy settings. Here you can easily communicate with whoever you want, whenever you want, both from an “active” and “passive” position. That is, to receive only self-selected information and share your content only with those to whom it is intended.
Fans of other services will say that this is nothing special, because any social network allows you to freely add and delete contacts. And yet, American openness, coupled with American respect for the private space of each individual, is reflected in the functionality and made it, perhaps, one of the most comfortable places for controlled social ties.
A standard option for any network is the direct addition and removal of contacts. This is exactly what aggressive online trolls, spammers and obvious scammers deserve, that is, the complete removal from the list of friends. But there are cases that are not so obvious. Sometimes real and virtual acquaintances intersect, and the movements of your mouse can become the subject of long fruitless discussions both with an offended "friend" and with numerous observers. And if there are relatives or office neighbors among the remote “friends”, then abstract reasoning can turn into very real conflicts.
It happens that you yourself do not want to break all virtual ties with a certain person - just a certain part of her network activity, to put it mildly, is annoying. And it happens that the dubious aphorisms of a colleague in your news feed do not bother you at all, but you would like to hide your own comments about the style of work of your general manager from him or her. Well, the functionality of Facebook makes it easy to implement these ideas.
radical removal
However, let's start with the well-known option - the complete removal of the contact. Sometimes this is the best choice. If you are lucky enough to add a completely random stranger to your feed, especially one who has a dubious reputation or clogs all communication channels with his advertising, then it is most reliable to part with him forever. By the way, the remote itself will only know about this if it specifically monitors your activity. Notifications that someone removed him from the list of friends, none of the Facebook users receive.
The procedure for deleting a contact is as follows.
- Find the avatar of an unwanted "friend" in any available place - for example, in your profile or in the news feed next to his next spam post.
- Hover over the avatar. After that, you will either immediately see a drop-down menu with the item “Unfriend” (“Unfriend”), or you will find the “Friends” button, and the menu will appear when you hover over this button.
- Click on the desired item and enjoy peace.
Removal from readers
It happens that the attention of a certain "friend" to your own network activity is not entirely desirable. Well, for example, if this friend is a mother-in-law or mother-in-law who believes that social networks simply steal your time from your family. Or if, by an evil twist of fate, you managed to add your tax inspector as a friend. Or even a personally harmless user does not share your pure love for butterflies and grasshoppers and rudely laughs at any posted photo of an insect.
Against a "friend" whose attention to your notes is undesirable, but a complete break seems premature, there are several tricks.
1. Put him on your "restricted" friends list. The procedure is to get to the same drop-down menu as when deleting, just click on the “add to lists” item and the “restricted” sub-item (in the English version: “add to lists, restricted”).
With this action, you restrict your friend's access to all your posts, except public ones. The option is suitable for those users for whom Facebook is primarily a means of communication, and not promoting themselves, so they post almost nothing to the public. Or for those cases when you purposefully restrict public access to a certain part of your content, and this is exactly the part that your mother-in-law should not devote to. For example, neither she nor your superiors for some reason cannot get used to the fact that you are well versed in snuff or rates in all the surrounding casinos. Well, let them think that your passions are long in the past.
2. Restrict access to specific posts. For each entry on Facebook, you can select your audience, and exclude from the number of readers not only people included in pre-created lists, but even a single user. If you consistently apply the “Audience selector” option, then it’s quite possible to give your mother-in-law (or is it mother-in-law?) the impression that you don’t spend a minute of extra time on this terrible Internet, and use the network solely for the sake of sending private messages to business partners.
The option works as follows. When sending an entry, click on the audience selection button (it can contain both the name of the function and the default option - for example, "available to everyone", or "only friends"). In the drop down menu you will see a list of options. Select "Custom" and then "Hide this from". In the input field, enter the names of unwanted readers.
Information Filters
An equally common situation is when you are tired of the records of a particular "friend" and do not want to read them. But they don’t intend to remove him from the list of contacts at all: in principle, the person is good, but what to do if his stories about the amount of alcohol consumed and eaten at the next buffet table already make you feel sick ...
The solution is simple: get to the same menu linked to the profile picture and pay attention to the “Show in news feed” item. If you are reading the “friend” posts posted in the feed, then there will be a bird next to this item. To get rid of annoying entries, you need to remove it. You can also select "Settings", then "What types of updates" ("What types of updates?") And free yourself only from a specific type of user-created updates, such as photos or games.
As usual, the censored user himself will not know anything.
Where are the guarantees?
The experience of millions of users proves that all these options really work. But Facebook, of course, cannot be responsible for all the actions of your especially curious and overactive "friends". Especially for their offline activity. For example, you put an overly talkative and touchy colleague on the list of “restricted” contacts, and he looked over your shoulder right at work and saw the settings set on the computer screen. You are sure that you have secured yourself from discussing your hobbies with your mother-in-law in the news feed, but she can still join the same group with you. And the settings for “restricted friends” do not apply to content posted in groups. You shielded yourself from the heartbreaking stories of virtual girlfriend novels in your chronicle, and she sends them to you in a personal. And so on. No automation cancels personal attention to your content and your virtual connections. Well, if you want to keep information completely secret, it’s better not to post it on social networks at all.
You will find the icon for choosing the readers for whom yours will be available in most places: changing the status, adding photos and other materials. Click a tool to limit or expand your potential readership.
The utility remembers the last selected target audience, and until it is changed, selects it as the default target audience for subsequent publications.
For example, if you selected Public to all, the next post will be visible everyone unless you change the audience when posting. The recipient selection icon is available in many places, including in your privacy settings. Changing the settings in one place causes the settings of this tool to be updated in all places where it is available.
The Readers' Choice icon is also next to the content you've posted, making it easy to change who can view a given post. If you want to change the audience of a previously published post, click on the Readers Select icon and select a new circle.
Remember that if you add a post to another person's feed, they will have control over the post's audience settings. In addition, the post can be seen by all the persons indicated in it, as well as their friends.
Facebook posting access lists
Lists allow you to share information with specific groups of Facebook users. After writing a post or adding new photos and other materials, you can use the recipient selection icon to specify a list of people with whom you want to share this content.
How to change access to a publication
You can use the audience selection icon to change the visibility of any previously published material. Remember that when you add something to a friend's feed, the friend already determines the circle of access.
Setting up access to information on Facebook
Here's an overview of who can see individual elements of your profile, and what tools you can use to control the visibility of content on your profile and post feed.
In the Motherboard edition of journalist Megan Neal, who studied data on the ranking of Facebook friend lists, talking with representatives of the social network and conducting a series of experiments.
We've all experienced this confusing situation when Facebook populates a friend list with a random high school friend you haven't spoken to in ten years, or an ex-colleague from a previous job you've long since forgotten existed.
My boyfriend uses Facebook, but neither he nor I have ever interacted on the social network, except for a few joint events. No photos, comments, likes, tags, marital status. However, when I asked him to go to his own page (for research purposes), in the friends column on the left, where only nine people were displayed, it was me, and in the very first square.
And what was his reaction? "It's because you're following me, stop doing it!".
How Facebook ranks friends is a real mystery, and a very disturbing one. Most of us don't quantify people, but in this case, a mysterious algorithm does it for us and we have no control over it.
Who is “chasing” whom is one of the most personal and vulnerable components of the information that the social network owns. In addition, social media generates a kind of premonition that if you have had little interaction with someone who is at the top of your friends list, then he is following you. It turns out that those whose page you yourself often visit can also understand this.
Google search results show a lot of troubling questions on Quora and Reddit about how Facebook builds its friend list.
People are afraid that the rating may signal a one-sided relationship, they get upset that they see someone they don’t like on the page, they panic because of the thought that their secret feelings can be revealed, and someone begins to suspect a lover of treason, when he sees some cutie in his top friends.
“A girl asked me about a few other girlfriends in the top 9. I tell her that I rarely talk to them and have no idea why they pop up there,” complained one Reddit user. “My ex is in the second position there, although we have not spoken since December, and I have not checked her profile since then. I used to correspond with a bunch of people, but why exactly is she still there? ”, Asked another visitor to the site.
There is no way to get exact answers to these questions because the details of Facebook's algorithms are classified. But we know about some factors that influence the formation of friends in the list, so we can turn to them for tips.
There are several places that display Facebook friends. If you click on the list of friends, then the people with whom we interact most often will appear at the top. Another sample is displayed in the sidebar on the left. The third group of users is collected for the chat list and is located on the right. Some names are displayed in the search bar when you click on it:
The social network also distributes friends according to categories: close friends, family, colleagues, classmates, and so on. Some lists are generated automatically based on where you live or work. It is assumed that the user should define the category "close friends" for himself, while Facebook itself offers to add some people there.
But what worries me the most is the table with nine friends on the left. According to the social network, this is a group of relevant users gathered as a hint. In other words, these are the people that the social network subtly encourages you to interact with. And if someone else visits your page, then he sees in this square users whom he already knows and who he might want to chat with.
Algorithms calculate how often and how long you have been in contact with other people. Therefore, the appearance of a random girl from a university in this square means that the social network is pushing you to communicate with those with whom you have not spoken for a long time, but at the same time you have known each other for a long time. It might also include people you've "befriended" recently, or people who've just posted new posts or photos.
And sometimes it's just random people.
Facebook's algorithms are constantly evolving - this is the company's secret sauce for pushing new features.
Today's formula is more complex. It uses machine learning technology and takes into account thousands of different data. But assuming the core functions remain the same, the system is likely to give different weights to interactions depending on their types. Being in a photo with a user or attending events with them are the best indicators of close communication, unlike “likes” and comments.
You can get a clearer picture of the algorithms by scrolling down the page with your timeline. Facebook tracks and records everything you do on the site, so with a deep analysis, you can notice these minor interactions that you probably forgot about a long time ago. Then there will be a connection between the people on the profile page and your actions in the past.
Facebook has always claimed that its ranking algorithms only take into account public interactions, so you shouldn't look for answers to questions in private messages or viewing other people's profiles.
“We use different classifications for different divisions (for friends on the profile page, for the chat list, and so on). For each of them, we develop the most suitable ranking, but we do not use private information ... ".
However, the issue of secret harassment continues to worry Facebook users. I created a fake account on purpose and "befriended" my real self, after which I started virtual stalking my real page for a few days. However, the fake friend never showed up on any of my social media lists.
I also did some other experiments. When I, for example, tagged people in a photo or they tagged me, those users moved up in the lists. If we stopped interacting with each other, they lost several positions in these groups.
Some things did surprise me. I realized that Facebook encourages me to add to the category of "close friends" those people whose pages I often visit. Their names also appeared in the search bar when I entered the first letter (obviously, this list displays people with whom you are not “friends”, but whose pages you visited recently).
Not so long ago, a familiar media person turned to me (whose last name, I probably won’t name, although it may be in vain) with a non-standard question. Namely: on her personal Facebook profile, she formed 5,000 friends. If you don't know, this is the last frontier. Further - no friends, only subscribers.
It would seem that I also have a problem - "I'm popular, what should I do next?". But for those who use social media as one of their main advertising channels, Facebook limits are not the best news.
In general, since I never solved such problems with my own hands (especially on my account), I went to Google. And googled. There is a way, you just need to dig a little (which, in fact, coupled with all the necessary links, I told the customer). But, as expected, she asked to take over the matter. And I took it.
Z.Y. Even if you have fewer than 5,000 Facebook friends, it's still best to know how to turn your personal profile into a page (which is what we're going to do). So don't go anywhere...
- First of all, realize that there are only 2 ways:
- delete everyone you don’t know, and periodically hint in the microblog that there is a “subscribe” button not far from the “add to friends” button;
- make your personal profile a public page (like those pages that are massively created on Fb for a variety of business purposes) with the preservation of all existing friends and subscribers in it.
It seems to me that the second option is still preferable. Because:
- you can continue to recruit friends-subscribers;
- you can still communicate with them in a personal;
- it is more customary to build targeted advertising on the page;
- all marketing analytics becomes much more detailed.
However, there are also disadvantages:
- the history of the microblog will be lost (entries will be deleted, although photos and videos can be saved);
- the interface will change (that is, if you are used to working in Fb from a user profile, at first it will be slightly unusual);
- pages and groups in which you were an administrator will have to be delegated to some user profile (your new one or one of your friends).
Actually, that's all. If you still agree that mutating to the “page” state is preferable, let’s move on.
- First of all, you need to order Facebook to upload information from your profile (the same photos, videos and correspondence). To do this, you just need to go to your settings (drop-down menu in the upper right corner / "settings" button). And then click "upload a copy of your Facebook information."
An important point: check the box that is listed as the main one. The customer and I lost about 2 weeks at this point. At one time, she deleted the box to which she registered the account, but did not change the spare box (which is named in a very similar way) in the settings. So we were waiting for a letter that physically could not reach.
- While you are waiting for the preparation of this very archive, it's time to start transferring the rights to administer groups and pages (especially if you administer them alone). To do this, you need to go to our favorite "Settings" inside the page, select "Page Roles" and add a person (or several) by defining a measure of authority for them. Once again I will make a reservation that it can be both your friends / colleagues, and your own new user account.
- A day or two after sending the application, an archive should come to your mail (the field for changing the e-mail address to the correct one, we received it in a day). You need to download the archive, unpack it, see if everything is fine, along the way, nostalgic about past affairs, doubt again whether you need to go to the page, and move on.
An important point: it is better to download the archive immediately, because after a few days it is automatically deleted (Facebook policy).
- The most important part of the work is here... Now that all the necessary preparations have been made,
