When you receive a new friend request from a stranger on Facebook, what’s the first thing you notice? Their profile picture, cover picture, bio, or mutual friends? While “mutual friends” might not be at the top of your priority list, they might be the most important factor in influencing you to accept or reject their request. Wondering how?
It is because if the mutual friends you have with them are great people that you know in real life, you’ll feel more confident about connecting with them. Are we right? Well, the problem we’ll address today revolves around mutual friends on Facebook as well.
If you want to hide your mutual Facebook friends from others on Facebook, this blog is just what you’re looking for.
Stay with us till the end to learn if it can be done and how. Later, we’ll also discuss how to customize the visibility of your entire friend list on Facebook.
Can You Hide Mutual Friends on Facebook?
Before we address the question you’re here to ask, let’s tell you a little about the concept of mutual friends. In a circle of three people, a mutual friend would be the person who’s the friend of the other two, even if those two might not know each other that well.
On Facebook, a mutual friend indicates someone who is on the friend list of both you and the third person (whose profile you’re checking out). Many social media users tend to trust strangers with mutual friends/connections more easily. This is because the presence of these mutual friends provides them reassurance that there might be a link between them in the real world, which might not always be true.
Now, coming back to the original question: is it possible to hide mutual friends from someone on Facebook?
Well, we regret to inform you that doing that is not possible on the platform. The visibility of mutual friends is a feature that helps users expand their network, which is why Facebook makes it a point to keep it visible to all users.
Even if you hide your friend list from your account settings, if you have mutual friends with someone, they will be able to see those on your profile. This is all we can tell you for now, but if the platform comes up with a setting that can help you hide your mutual friends, we’ll be the first ones to tell you about it.
How to Hide Mutual Friends on Facebook
- Open Facebook and log into your account if you haven’t done so already.
- Once you’re on your newsfeed, tap on the three-line icon on the extreme right corner of your screen.
- As soon as you tap on it, you’ll see a menu screen, scroll down and tap on Settings & privacy.
- Next, tap on Settings, which will be the first option on it.
- Scroll down to the Audience and Visibility section and tap on How People Find and Contact You.
- You’ll find five questions, the question that concerns you is the second one: Who can see your friend list? Tap on it.
- If you’ve never edited this setting before, you’ll find Public is selected by default.
- Select Only Me from the list, and your friend list will no longer be accessible to other people on Facebook.
- Now ask your friends to restrict who can view their friends list to Only Me, it will hide your mutual friends from them.
How to Hide Friend List from Specific People
Suppose you don’t want to hide your friend list from everyone. Perhaps it’s just a bunch of nosy friends or a couple of distant relatives that you want to hide your friend list from. Is there a way to do that on Facebook? Yes, most certainly.
While such a setting was not available on the platform back when Facebook was launched, it was added for the convenience of the users later on.
To hide your friend list from specific people, you’ll first need to follow all the seven steps mentioned earlier. Once you reach the list, instead of choosing Only Me, you’ll have to pick Friends except… this time.
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