How to find out if someone has unfriended or blocked you on Facebook

The site doesn’t make it easy

Aatif Sulleyman
Wednesday 29 November 2017 19:50 GMT
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A Facebook like button is pictured at the Facebook's France headquarters in Paris, France, November 27, 2017
A Facebook like button is pictured at the Facebook's France headquarters in Paris, France, November 27, 2017

The ability to remove and block Facebook friends is handy, but the site doesn’t make it easy to find out if other people have blocked or removed you as a friend.

That’s understandable, since finding out that a certain someone has banished you from their digital world isn’t exactly the nicest feeling in the world.

Scanning and re-scanning your friends list will only get you so far. You have to do a little detective work to ensure you haven’t got the wrong end of the stick.

After all, it might not be personal in the slightest – they may have simply deactivated or deleted their Facebook account.

The fact you’re reading this article suggests you already have an inkling that a one-time Facebook friend has kicked you to the curb.

Once you’ve established that the suspect – who you were definitely Facebook friends with at one point in the past – no longer appears in your friends list, it’s time to start digging deeper.

Your first port of call should be Messenger.

Search for the former one-time Facebook friend in your inbox and, if they’re still on Facebook and haven’t blocked you, their profile picture and name will appear under the More People heading.

When you block someone, they lose the ability to start a Facebook chat with you. So, by that reckoning, if you still have the option to message someone you’re no longer friends with – not that you’d want to – you haven’t been blocked, simply unfriended.

However, even if your suspect doesn’t appear in Messenger when you search their name, it still doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve blocked you.

They may have instead left Facebook completely. By scrolling back through your old messages, you may stumble across greyed-out profile pictures labelled Facebook User.

These belong to people who used to be Facebook friends with you, but are no longer members of the social network.

You can find out who these dormant profiles used to belong to by clicking the grey icons, reading through your message history and going for a stroll down memory lane.

While you can scan all of these and, by process of elimination, rule suspects out and establish a shortlist of people who are likely to have blocked you, doing so can be tricky and really arduous.

Facebook has, quite simply, done a good job of protecting the identities of friend blockers.

The site’s handy privacy settings, which allow you to control who can find your profile through search, who can add you as a friend, and how much of your page others can see, make it almost impossible to work out if you’ve been blocked, or if they’ve locked down their profile for everyone.

Your best bet could be to ask a mutual friend if they have access to the suspect’s profile, and compare notes on what you can see, and what they can.

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