Unwanted friends and followers on social media

When you are on social media, you would have friends or followers and you don't have to associate yourself or friends or follow anybody you don't need to, or don't want to. Now, different social media accounts have different words for it, something like YouTube, you subscribe to someone's channel, which you can easily just unsubscribe. Now by doing this, it means you are not getting updates from their website in your feed. So, therefore, there is less information that you don't really want. So if you have in the past, followed somebody on YouTube, subscribe to them, you can just unsubscribe. Now, we will look at two other ways of doing it, which are Facebook and Twitter. Now, by looking at how these work, they are pretty much the same with all the social media outlets there. Now, with Facebook, you would have friends, so you can change the settings to see what people can see about you. So there is privacy settings on the dashboard so that maybe all you show is your picture and your name, and nothing else. Or you can have people that anybody can see any item on your page at all that you want. Then, depending on what you are using Facebook for, this will vary on what settings you actually want to have that set up for. So for example, if you have got a business page, you probably do not mind people seeing the entire page. And then if you want them to follow you, then great.

And if it is your personal Facebook account, then people would have to put a friend request into you. So with the friend's request, the person will find you on Facebook, they request you as a friend, you will then get a notification, which depending on how you have set it up, will either pop up as a pop-up message when you log onto Facebook, or you will get an email to say you've had a friends request, and you will physically have to click a button to allow that person to be friends with you. So, that is a straightforward way of doing it. Now, you will find people who try and befriend you, who you have never heard of. And so it is up to you whether you accept or don't accept them. But just make sure that the settings on your Facebook page are as you want them. Because if you have someone who is trying to spam your Facebook accounts, all they can do is befriend you and then they can put all sorts of posts on there. And if you don't notice them, then every single person looking at your page can see those. So just be aware of who you are actually allowing access to your personal Facebook.

Now, if we look here, all we have already done is gone on to the people who we are currently following here. So if we want to stop anyone that we are following, we have got a few choices. So if we take this one here, if we just click on these dots, you have got some options, you can make the person a favourite, you can edit the friend's list, but these are the two ones we keep looking at here, unfollow would mean that although this person is still a friend of yours, you are not seeing them in the feed.

So you are not hearing all their stories. If there is somebody who puts a Facebook post every five minutes on Facebook, all you keep seeing is what they are doing all day long, you want to stop that, you do not want to offend them by unfriending them, you can just hit the unfollow and you won't get the updates. But this one here is to unfriend them. So if we click on that, what will then happen is we will come up with a pop-up message and it says, "Are you sure you want to unfriend this person?" If you are happy with it, you just hit confirm. If you are not, just hit cancel and that will take you back where you were. So when you unfriend somebody, it means that they then cannot access your page, you can also go through further settings of blocking people as well. Or you can report people directly to Facebook, should they be doing anything that you think is out of order. So if you are blocking somebody that is a little bit more than unfriending them, because you are stopping them ever even seeing your page, they won't be able to see it, whatever, unless you then allow them back in again. So unfriending someone is quite straightforward.

Now if we look at another social media account, which is the Twitter account. Now with Twitter, these are what you call followers, so you can follow people. And what you can do with this, if you just take this account here, if we just highlight over it, see it changes into red, we can unfollow them.

So this will mean that the minute we are following this company if you want to unfollow them hit that and it will change it back again. Also, what you can do, if you go onto somebody's actual page, there are some dots. And with those dots, if you click them, you get another drop-down message. And what you can do here is mute them. In other words, you are not then seeing updates from them, you can block them, which will mean that you are blocking them from seeing your post, or you can report them. So if it is something serious, you can report them to Twitter and then they will take action. By reporting them you are also going to be blocking them at the same time. So these are different ways that you can tidy up the people who are accessing your accounts, as people you maybe don't want to see your account they cannot see it.

But also if you are getting any abusive stuff coming through on social media, there is usually always a way of blocking that person or reporting them to avoid them causing any problems to you. Because if they are causing you upset, it may well be they are causing other people upset, so the more people block them, the more it will identify with social media provider, that maybe this account is not a good account to have on their system.