Why the Number of Your Facebook Friends Has Increased?

You might have noticed and been wondering why there’s a sudden spike on the number of your Facebook friends. The article explains why Facebook has done it, why really Facebook did it and how to fix it.

In an article by WebProNews, it is confirmed that Facebook now includes deactivated accounts in your total friends count.

Josh Wolford reported that, Facebook has told me that your friend count does in fact include some deactivated friends –

We recently changed the way we count the number of people you are friends with to include some accounts that are not currently active on the service. It is important to note, that while we are showing different counts, no additional user information will be available. Due to our internal infrastructure we can provide an even faster experience for those that use our service by showing these modified counts.

Facebook said that the reason they show you your deactivated friends on your list is so that you can defriend them and to “prevent any possible security risk posed by temporarily deactivated friends.”

How to Fix It (Recommended Actions)

Mari Smith, the Facebook Marketing Expert,has posted some really helpful recommended course of actions on the issue (via her Facebook page)

1. Go through your list of friends and unfriend the ones with deactivated accounts. They will have no profile image (but note that there are some active accounts that just don’t have a profile image – more on this below).

2. Click on your total friends to go to the list of friends.

IMPORTANT POINTS:

3. Once you click the “Remove from Friends” button, you’ll then see a final popup confirming the friend has been removed. *DO NOT* click the “ok” button on the final popup, as you’ll go back to the beginning of your friend list and will have to start scrolling down all over again! Just ignore the final popup & keep scrolling down to unfriend the next deactivated account.

You may find some friends have simply not loaded a profile picture and it’s hard to tell if their account is live or has been deactivated. Be careful of clicking on these types of accounts – doing so will take you to their profile and, again, you’ll lose your place when scrolling down. (If you have a lot of friends, it can be a pain to have to start the scroll over again!)

4. A simple solution is to HOVER over the friend’s name and look in the address bar at the foot of your browser.

5. If it is a profile URL, then that’s an active account with no profile photo. You can RIGHT CLICK and open the friend’s profile in a new tab to see if you want to remain friends or not. To unfriend an active account from their profile, hover over the “Friends” button and select “Unfriend” in the drop down menu. In this case, it’s fine to click the “Okay” button and close that tab.

If the URL looks like this: https://www.facebook.com/xxxxx/friends?ft_ref=mni# (where xxxxx is your profile username), then that is a deactivated account and it’s safe to click the URL to unfriend.

As you scroll through your friends, you’ll also see blank spaces — these are people you used to be friends with … and will forever remain a mystery who they are. LOL!

(Hat tip to Dora Crow, Brandee Sweesy and Tammy Scheyer for the Ninja trick on ignoring the Okay button! See Brandee’s video here: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10150965120698840&set=vb.821788839)

Why REALLY is Facebook doing This?

A commenter on Mari Smith‘s post pretty much nailed it:

They’re artificially inflating numbers of contacts so they can sell us to advertisers. As usual, follow the money. That’s what we are to them; a ‘product’ to be sold and used.