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How to hide and unhide friends in Facebook

Less dramatic than unfriending or blocking Facebook friends, hiding simply removes their status updates from your News Feed.

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
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Matt Elliott

If you have a Facebook friend who updates his or her status with incredibly uninteresting topics and with too great a frequency, there is a way to remove this person's posts from your News Feed without the awkwardness associated with unfriending or blocking the person in question. You can hide a friend's updates, which removes them from your News Feed but keeps them on your friends list. They'll never know they've been hidden. And the process is simple to reverse, should you want to unhide the offending friend and add their updates back to your News Feed.

To hide a Facebook friend (or news source or band or anything you've friended or liked that appears on your News Feed), simply click on the small, gray X that appears when you mouse over a status update. You'll then be able to hide that particular post or, more usefully, hide all posts by that friend.

 
No offense, Dan; just using you as an example (as far as you know). To hide updates from an offending entity, click on the X that appears when you mouse over a person's, an app's, or a page's update. Matt Elliott/CNET

Hiding someone or something from your News Feed is easy enough--maybe too easy. If you accidentally hid someone or intentionally hid someone but then missed their frequent, boring status updates, it's easy to unhide that person--if you know where to look.

To unhide a friend, an app, or a page, call up this pop-up window by clicking the Edit Options link at the bottom of your News Feed. Matt Elliott/CNET

Scroll all the way to the bottom of the News Feed page, and click the Edit Options button. In the resulting pop-up window, you can click the gray X to unhide any previously hidden friend, app, or page.