Facebook etiquette question: How do you stop someone from mining your friends?

Why are they accepting his friendship? Can’t you put out a post requesting them to defriend him?

Change your privacy settings. You can’t make your friends change theirs but it does help to have Only Friends as the default for most things and like @janbb asked, why are your friends accepting requests from someone they don’t even know?

You could just unfriend him and tell your friends that he’s bugging to do the same.

He’s in my “friends list” because well, we were good friends in real life years ago. We kept in contact occasionally and this was a great way to reconnect. Then, as soon as he got in, he went berserk. I’m considering unfriending him to make my point, but in the short term, I’m trying to explain to him why this is so wrong in a way that he understands. He’s not getting it and now thinks my request is immature.

@figbash: If you unfriend him, he won’t be notified by fb and he might not even notice your missing posts. The friends of yours who are annoyed, you can let them know he’s become more of a pest than a pleasure and leave it up to them to follow your suit in undfriending.

I’m just curious why your friends would accept his friend request in the first place if they don’t know him?

I would just send a stack of messages to all of these people (I think you may be limited to 20 at a time) and let them know politely that he kind of “hijacked” your list and you’ve noticed that he’s been acting erraticaly and they might want to consider dropping him because he (in your opinion) inappropriately went into your list and started randomly friending people. Then they can decide to drop him or not. He sounds like a douche.

simple solution – unfriend his ass.

I know, I was just looking for a way to explain to him why it’s not okay in a way that he undertstands and still keeps goodwill.

As for why people accept his requests, I just think that when I am the connection, they assume I’m responsible for sending him their way. They don’t want to hurt his feelings and/or my feelings, I guess. He just becomes attached to the person who ‘friended’ him.

Why don’t people who friended the stranger now unfriend the stranger and don’t make his and their actions anything to do with you. You are not anyone’s keeper and why do you care about the goodwill of your sister’s ex-boyfriend? You ought to get out of this one quick.

There’s nothing you can do to stop someone from checking out your friends list and friending those people themselves.

I really don’t think this is your problem; I think it’s up to the people who are annoyed by him to deal with. Why would they be accepting friend requests from someone they don’t know? It’s their own fault if they’re annoyed by him – they can unfriend him anytime they want. If they’d rather bitch at you about it, there’s something wrong there.

@Seelix: I originally went that route and figured they’d handle it, but it just continued to get worse. I’ve had people confront me with it and I’ve had to make multiple apologies because his behavior is out of hand. I’ve then encouraged them to unfriend him. Where it’s starting to get to be a pain in the ass is the sheer volume and scope of the people. In one instance he had friended someone who reports to me. They were in my office and I was having a serious conversation abou their performance, and at the end they were like “Oh yeah…your friend ____ contacted me on Facebook.” etc. etc. That’s when I decided to say something.

That’s really unfortunate that it’s gotten that out of hand. If I were in your situation, then, I’d just unfriend him.

He sounds like a troll; just because you were friends a few years ago is no reason to keep him now.

i don’t understand why people would hold you responsible for his behavior? Furthermore, if they don’t like him they can at any time unfriend him. These are all adults and they can handle themselves, and should not hold you accountable.

I’m not sure why you feel you have to continuously explain to this immature idiot why he is acting badly. From what you have said, you’ve explained it, he doesn’t want to listen, so unfriend him. You have no obligation to consider his feelings by this point. It’s just a social network site, it’s not like he is going to die if you unfriend him.

The point is not that they’re holding me accountable – it’s that he’s getting totally invasive.

He’s contacting my effin’ co-workers, exes and colleagues. Sure, they don’t have to accept him, and some aren’t, but there’s still the awkward explanation when they simply want to know who he is (it’s clear that he’s connected to me) and why in the world he’s contacting them. Just the act of having to explain that to one of my employees (?!) was enough for me to intervene.

So if you unfriend him and set your setting to private, he can’t get to your friends anymore.

i really dont see why this issue has to be so complicated? am i missing something?

You can’t really control who other people add as friends and if other people are accepting his requests then it is their problem, not yours. I say, don’t stress about it.

Thanks to all for the answers.