Managing Inactive Accounts on Facebook

Last summer I hit upon a trick on that can be useful to anyone who has maxed out on the number of friends they can have on Facebook but still wants to add new people. One way I have seen people manage the onerous 5,000 friend limit on Facebook is by having multiple personal accounts there, but I have seen a number of downsides with that over the years (including putting already limited time into managing supposedly co-equal accounts). 

In short, if you go into your Friends list on Facebook and scroll through it, the profile pictures for deactivated accounts will display only as silhouettes. Any number of these are presumably accounts of people who just got sick of dealing with Facebook, or who never really started using it to any extent, but a certain proportion of them are people who have died and had their accounts deactivated by friends or family members. Prior to discovering this, it would not have occurred to me that deactivated accounts would could against the number of friends someone can have, but this is indeed the case. 

If you click on one of these silhouettes, you will get this message: "This account has been deactivated. Only you can see 'John' on your friends list. You have the option to unfriend 'John'." Those last two words are hotlinked and all you have to do is click on them. Some socially awkward people only use silhouettes, however, so if you don’t want to delete them you can click on their names to see if they are still active rather than just unfriend them! On my second and most recent use of this trick, however, I looked at a number of

The first time I used this trick, about nine months prior to posting this article, I easily cleared out 305 deactivated accounts in the course of an evening while watching TV; somewhat late in the process I also decided to unfriend people without Profile Pictures who I noticed had never actually posted anything or had not done so for more than a year and were thus clearly not ever or no longer active on Facebook.

I used this trick for the second time just prior to posting this article and removed 78 inactive friends, among them a handful who had only posted a few times and not at all for a number of years.

Hope this can be as useful to others as it has been to me! It takes a little bit of effort but shows respect for people we have become friends with by not unfriending those who are still active (and is infinitely preferable to those horrible, bullying messages some people post declaring they are unfriending anyone who doesn't respond by begging to remain in contact with them).