Being Downright Unfriendly

facebook_logo.jpgDid you see that the New Oxford American Dictionary has named “unfriend” as its word of the year? Reuters is reporting that it was chosen from a list of finalists with a technical flavour.

Unfriend the term used when you delete someone as a friend on a social network like Facebook or Twitter.

I must admit to unfriending people from time to time. When you get started on something like Facebook or Twitter it’s easy to say yes to every friend request but after a while you realise that as in real life, you should choose your friends more carefully.

While I know that anything published online can end up being read by more people than you intend, I still choose to limit those who I invite into my world. I guess that this blog and my Twitter tweets are open to the world while the stuff I put on Facebook is a little more private. I’ve got almost 500 Facebook friends which is still a lot but a while back I did unfriend a bunch of people because I simply didn’t know them in any way.

What’s your “Facebook Policy”? Do you open up your Facebook to the world or are you very selective? have you had to unfriend people? Did they know about it and if so what was their reaction?



Do you think some of your friends would enjoy reading Being Downright Unfriendly? Please use the buttons below to share the post. Thanks.

About the author

Rodney Olsen

Rodney is a husband, father, cyclist, blogger and podcaster from Perth Western Australia.

He previously worked in radio for about 25 years but these days he spends his time at Compassion Australia, working towards releasing children from poverty in Jesus' name.

The views he expresses here are his own.

View all posts

2 Comments

  • My ‘policy’ is that I don’t accept friend requests unless I know the person in some way. I may not have seen them for years (school friends for instance) but at least I know who they are and that they’re not dodgy. Blogging friends still count as ‘knowing’ them because they aren’t hiding behind a persona and we know mutual people.

    I haven’t ‘unfriended’ anyone but I have knocked back a fair few friend requests from randoms who just add people for the sake of it. I don’t understand why anyone would want to do that! To brag about they’re large list of friends maybe? Who knows…

  • I pretty much will accept friend requests from people if they are local or if we have mutual friends. I use my FB for networking for my blog and the ministry I’m involved in. I set up filters for my personal friends and family in the news feed so I can keep tabs on that easier.

    I just developed a policy not to accept people who won’t use their real name though. I don’t really unfriend anybody (I’ve only done it twice – once for spam and another for profanity), but I’ve had a number unfriend me because I talk about the two taboo subjects – politics and religion :).

    But that is their choice, I can be friends with people who disagree with me, but some people don’t feel the same way.

Join the conversation