How to Prevent someone From Seeing your Posts on Facebook without Unfriending Them

While social networking sites have expanded the circle of one’s social contacts, they are not always useful in differentiating between levels of friendship. Thus you may be eager to put a little distance between a Facebook friend or tired of one who keeps posting annoying messages on your Facebook wall. However unfriending someone may turn out to be rather rude, not to mention confrontational. So here are a few tips on how to prevent someone from seeing your posts on Facebook without actually unfriending them.

Restrict your visibility

If this person makes inappropriate comments on your updates and photos or posts annoying messages on your Facebook wall, you can take steps to become fully or partially invisible to him/her. This will give them less opportunity to posts comments related to you. It's possible to adjust your privacy settings so they no longer see parts of your profile that you don't want them to comment on. Click on "Customize Settings" from your privacy page and then for each aspect of your profile, select "Customize" from the dropdown menu. Type the friend's name into "Don't share this with" and then save the changes.

Hiding this person from your feed

Just like you can restrict your visibility to friends of your choice, you can also choose to see posts only of certain people. If you have had your fill of boring or annoying updates from someone, then you can avoid their updates simply by hiding this person from your feed. Next time you see an update from this person, hover your mouse over it and a little gray "x" or "v" will show up on the upper right. Click on it and then click the "Hide..." button. Once the update is hidden, more options will appear. Click on "Change what updates you get..." and choose the setting you want to apply like “Only Important”.

Put him/her on Acquaintance List

Then again there are some over-sharing friends who you may not be ready to hide completely but wish to minimizing irritating or boring updates from them. One way of dealing with them is to put them on the Acquaintance list. Once you do, Facebook will automatically pare down the number of news feed updates you receive from them to a bare minimum. For example, you might still get notified that a far-flung Facebook acquaintance got married or landed a new job, but you’ll be spared of the daily kitty snapshots. To add a friend to your Acquaintance list, hover your mouse over their name on their timeline or in your news feed. When you see the pop-up window with their profile photo and a “Friends” button, take your mouse over that button which in turn will reveal a new pop-up menu. Once the “Acquaintances” option appears, click it. For greater control over which updates you would like to see from a specific friend, click  on “Settings,”  Instead of “Acquaintances,”  and then start unchecking categories , like from “Life Events” to “Comments and Likes”.

Best of all, relegating a friend to the Acquaintance List will also make it possible for you to restrict your own posts to that person. If you ever want to hide a post of your own from the folks on your Acquaintances list, you can choose the “Friends except Acquaintances” option from the audience selector which comes in the pull-down menu that sits right next to the Post button.

Indeed, putting an over-sharing friend on your Acquaintance list makes for the perfect way to dial down their endless updates without silencing them altogether. And you needn’t worry about hurt feelings since your friend will never know that you relegated them to your Acquaintance list.

Banish him/her to the Restricted List

If you really dislike this person and are one step short of unfriending him/her, try banishing the friend to the Restricted List. Once you put someone on your Restricted list, their links, photos and updates won’t appear in your news feed at all, although you might see their name pop up in the ticker once in a long while. Even better, they’ll no longer see any of your updates, photos, or other Facebook activity—or at least, nothing that you haven’t flagged as “Public” in your privacy settings. In order to put someone on the Restricted List, hover your mouse over their name in your news feed or on their timeline, wait for the pop-up window to appear, then click the Friends button. Select “Add to another list” from the menu, scroll all the way down, then click Restricted. While Facebook won’t notify a friend that you’ve put them on your Restricted list, an overly-watchful frenemy may well notice that they’re not seeing your “friends only” updates anymore.

Turn off the chat feature for that friend

An indirect method of restricting the visibility of your posts to a person without actually unfriending him/her is to minimize other forms of communication  with this person. And one of the easiest ways to do is to Turn off the chat feature for that friend. Your friend will still be able to send you messages, but they will go to your inbox instead of popping up in a chat window. You’ll also receive them as messages on any mobile Facebook apps you choose to install on your phone. To turn off the chat feature for this particular person, Go to the bottom right of the chat sidebar and click the gear icon, then "Advanced Settings". Now type his/her name in the field after "Turn on chat for all friends except…” Once he/she is unable to chat with you on Facebook, he/she may get the message that you are trying to limit communication and ease off by themselves.

Be aware of the consequences

Your friend will not be notified that you've hidden them on your feed, or locked them out of certain parts of your profile. If you have mutual friends and they're observant, though, they might still find out. For example, a mutual friend could comment on your photo, and that shows up in your other friend's feed, and when your other friend clicks through to the photo, they are told they can't see it and might wonder why your mutual friend can see it, and they can't.

When you change your mind

Over time, if you wish to put a Facebook friend back into circulation with your news feed, there are means to reverse the situation. First, go to your news feed, hover your mouse over the News Feed link in the top-left corner of the page, click the little pencil icon, then click Edit Settings. A pop-up window should appear, complete with the names of all the friends whose updates no longer appear in your news feed. If you happen to change your mind on any of them, Click the little “X” next to their name and then on this you will be able to view this person’s comments and posts.