Is it wrong to unfriend someone on social media and not tell them that you’ve done so?
A reader we’re calling Niamh recently decided to cull her list of friends and contacts on social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and X. Over the years, Niamh had accepted many requests to connect from people who she didn’t really know or only knew remotely. While she knows she could snooze a friend’s posts for several weeks so her feed wasn’t full of things she didn’t care about, increasingly she found she was receiving messages from people on her contacts list asking for introductions to her other real friends, for help finding a job or for requests that she meet talk with them about some sort of service they offered.
Niamh knows she could simply ignore such messages, but the temptation not to do so overcomes her. She also knows she could consider deleting some of her social media accounts, but she doesn’t care to do that because she sometimes finds them useful to stay connected to friends and colleagues who she actually does know.
Niamh has decided to go through her lists of friends and contacts on each of her social media sites and unfriend or unfollow anyone whose name she doesn’t recognize as well as those people with whom she only has a remote connection. She plans to start by unfollowing anyone she doesn’t really know who has sent her an unsolicited message asking her for something.
While this can be a time-consuming activity, Niamh is convinced it will be worth it if her lists of connections and friends consists of people with whom she’d truly like to stay connected. But Niamh wonders if she has any obligation to let at least some of the people who are on her disconnect list know that she’s disconnecting from them. She did, after all, agree to connect with them even if she can’t remember why she did so beyond trying to be nice.
Is it wrong, she asked, to simply dump them and say nothing?
While it may feel callous to do so, there is absolutely nothing wrong with unfollowing or unfriending someone if that person wasn’t really someone you knew or wanted to be connected with. It’s not like shunning someone at the high school lunch table or telling colleagues they are no longer welcome to join you and others for a casual lunch. Even in the latter case, you wouldn’t tell someone they aren’t welcome to join you. You just would invite the people you wanted to have lunch with and leave it at that.
It's unlikely, but if some unfriended contacts notice they’ve been cut and send hostile messages, then Niamh can choose to block them and their messages. But given that they likely don’t know Niamh any better than she knows them, the result of her cuts is most likely to be silence.
The right thing is for Niamh to decide whom she’d like to stay connected with and then stay connected with them and lose the others if she’s willing to put in the time to do so.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.
Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.
(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
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