Reasons for "Unfriending" on Facebook
- The biggest reason Sibona found for people unfriending former Facebook friends is their excessive need to post everything about their lives and interests on their Facebook walls -- no matter how unimportant the posts really are. Examples include posting all your tweets, Delicious bookmarks, Foursquare check-ins, movie reviews and status updates on what you are doing every hour of the day. Many of these posts end up in your friends' News Feeds, messing up their walls and diluting the truly important posts and updates they actually care to read.
- Of all the people surveyed, Sibona found that 25 percent of them unfriended people for posting too often about politics. Other polarizing and inappropriate topics that lead to people unfriending others included those about religion and sex and those with a racist or sexist slant. Some also unfriended others whose posts contained a lot of negative or offensive language.
- Sibona found that people who unfriended others on Facebook due to offline reasons disliked the people they unfriended far more than those who unfriended people for online reasons. Offline reasons for unfriending others included personality and behavior factors, trust and betrayal issues and the end of a romantic or platonic relationship.
- Sibona found that people who commonly "unfriend" others on Facebook tend to be the dominant one in the relationship and held the upper hand by unfriending certain people before those people could unfriend them. As well, the person who initiated the friendship was more likely to be unfriended than the other way around. The reactions of those who have been unfriended ranged from amusement to being deeply hurt.
