Questions about Blocking People on Facebook

by Lauren Huston on January 8, 2013

Share

I am not looking at my analytics right now but I am fairly certain that my most popular blog posts are the ones about blocking people on Facebook. This is clearly a hot-button issue and I have read all of your questions. I wrote the posts about a year ago and I still receive a few questions per day about online blocking. Thank you so much for your interaction and for reaching out to me for guidance.

I have read all of your questions and I consistently do my best to get back to you. I am hearing you and I understand that there is a need for a more comprehensive guide to what happens when you are blocked or when you block someone. A lot of your questions are very specific and, unfortunately, the answers to them change. Since I wrote the series of articles about blocking, Facebook has updated its privacy settings many times and some of the original glitches that were involved with blocking are no longer issues. Of course, new concerns have replaced the old ones.

As I said in one of my posts, I am not a fan of blocking. In most cases, I do not believe that blocking is appropriate and since I wrote the articles, I have not blocked a single person on Facebook. I have chosen to reserve the feature for perceived danger, which I am (Knock on wood.) lucky to currently not have in my life. Should a threatening or harassing issue arise, I would not hesitate to block someone but it is not something that I would do with happiness and it is not something that I would care to do frequently.

With that said, I am going to do some investigative research for all of you because I want to answer your questions as correctly and as completely as I can. I am going to go “under cover” and play around with tagging, blocking, and image removing. I will tackle the items that you want to know.

I already have dozens of questions about blocking people on Facebook but if you would like to add more to my list, go ahead and ask me in the comment section below. I will write another blog post reporting back with as much information as I can. What questions do you have about blocking people on Facebook?

Related Posts

Tagged as: Facebook

  • stevetheowl

    Great post, Lauren! I know that I have been loathe to block people. The only times that I have ever blocked someone were cases of harassment or if it was a fake profile trying to get me to go to a porn website or something like that. It is definitely something that should only be used as an absolute last resort.

  • Abby

    I want to be able to block someone who already has me blocked. Reason being is that I want control on my facebook. They can unblock me to check on my status which I don’t want.

  • jeffrey

    what if I did not post anything on my exwife page and ,I have a court order
    stating that ,I have the right to know were my son lives and what kind of people his with it is also the law, when this women is wanted not showing up for court moving over and over for years and I find her on fasebook took some copys, some one told her about it more then likey the ones that help her before to get my son out of State ,So as long as a parent dose not post anything he your she should have the right to look over there page for the welfare of all children it may save a life.

  • Nicole

    Someone has blocked me. But Him and I have mutual friends. I posted a PICTURE on the mutual friends page. Is the person who blocked me be able to see it? The mutual friend is also tagged in it, but I am not.

  • Tee

    My bf blocked me and added me back and even tho I CAN SEE where his profile page says in a relationship, I don’t know if others can see it because for one, on his page it says nowhere that he changed his relationship status to in a relationship. Now if he blocked me and added me back, wouldn’t both of our relationship statuses automatically have disappeared? Cause at first we were hyperlinked as being in a relationship with our names. On my page now, it says 2 ppl like my changed relationship status. But I see nothing like that on his. Does that mean he updated his relationship status to being in a relationship but only made it visible to me?

  • Dee

    I had a problem with a FB ‘friend’. He was incredibly rude to me, and long story short, I decided to unfriend him. We were neighbors in a game, so I needed to remove him as a neighbor as well. After that, he sent me a very nasty message. I then decided to block him. I thought that would be it for hearing from him. WRONG ! Even though he is blocked, and removed as a neighbor in my game, he is STILL sending me requests in my game. We’re not supposed to be able to have contact of ANY kind. How do I change this?

  • http://www.facebook.com/simon.tier.7 Simon Tier

    Hi. It has come to my attention that some professional bodies – for example medical professionals are advised to remove from their friends list anyone who may compromise their carer/client relationship. Whilst this is understandable, they are also specifically advised to also block said friend. My question is – what are the consequences of an individual being blocked by multiple users? Is there a number at which FB suspends that user’s account – arguably through no fault of their own?

  • http://www.facebook.com/tatianaka Tatiana Vega

    Hi Lauren!

    I can see this is an old article. But I just got blocked by my
    boyfriend. (ex-boyfriend). And we were tagged in a lot of pictures
    together, from my albums. Do you know if FB changed this? Because every
    single picture he was tagged in from my albums, got removed. And I don`t
    think I could untag himself in every each picture under 5 minutes. And I
    guess the same thing would be if I blocked someone who had a lot of
    pictures of me, I would automatically be untag from the persons
    pictures. Thank you :)

  • http://www.laurenhuston.com Lauren Huston

    I’m actually not sure about those circumstances. I think it would depend on state law and that isn’t my area of expertise.

  • http://www.laurenhuston.com Lauren Huston

    Do you know the person’s email address? If you know the email address that he or she uses for Facebook, you can block the email address and it will act as a block if the person briefly unblocks you.

  • Nikita

    Hey, Lauren!

    I see this is an older post, but it relates to a situation I’m in right now..It is not as severe as my family members blocking me, but it has left me baffeled nontheless and I wonder what to make of it.

    Two months ago I met a guy while I was studying abroad and we had a good connection, but since I left back home 2 weeks after we met I didn’t think much of it. After some time he added me on Facebook, where we had many very personal conversations and since I’m going back abroad soon, we were talking a lot about meeting up; in short he showed a great interest in me and in our ‘reunion’. But then one time after we had a normal conversation, no argument or tension or anything negative, everything seemed fine, he just blocked me out of the blue. I was of course completely at a loss for a reasonable explanation, so in the end I decided to just not care about it and move on. After one week though, he unblocked me to send me a text asking for my Skype contact. I was curious for an explanation, so I gave him my Skype contact, and he tried to talk to me a couple of times, but we weren’t able to find a right time for both of us to be online, so he told me to connect to Skype as much as possible and then blocked me on FB.. AGAIN.

    I cannot grasp, why he would still want to stay in contact, if he felt the need to actually block me out? Do you perhaps have some better idea of what could prompt someone to do that?

  • jessica

    Im not sure if Im blocked or not: On my phone, I can see whether the person is on facebook or not, but when I message the person, I receive a error message “content not found”. I am able to see his profile picture on fb but unable to see his page. If I message him using my phone, it will not allow me to send the message., please explain

Previous post:

Next post: