How to Stop Friend Suggestions on Facebook

The “People You May Know” feature is probably Facebook’s most annoying feature, even for those looking for new Facebook friends.

Thankfully, this is a feature you can restrict from the Facebook settings menu on all devices, both on the PC and mobile. Keep in mind that this will not stop friend suggestions entirely; you will still see the suggestions pop up while you browse Facebook. Also, note that the suggestions are for finding new friends to make – you need a different method to find out who unfriended you.

How to Stop Facebook Friend Suggestions on Windows and Mac Devices?

Friend suggestions and friend requests are two different things. If you want to prevent people outside your friends list from viewing your profile, you need to lock your profile.

Let’s look at how to turn off friend suggestions on Facebook:

1. Open Facebook and click the Account icon in the top right corner to bring down the drop-down menu. The first option, Settings & privacy, is what you need.

2. In the second menu that shows up, select Settings.

3. All the settings you can customize on Facebook are listed on the left. Scroll down until you find the Notifications option under the Preferences section and click on it.

4. This lets you adjust all notifications settings, and there are quite a lot of them. Find the People you may know.

5. This brings up the three categories of notifications you can block – Push, E-Mail, and SMS. Or you can just disable the notifications completely using the topmost toggle.

6. Once disabled, the toggle is grayed out, and the subcategories vanish. Now, you will not get friend suggestion notifications on Facebook.

How to Stop Facebook Friend Suggestions on Android, iPhone, and iPad?

Apart from slight UI differences, the mobile versions of Facebook have the same settings menu as in the web app. To disable Facebook’s friend suggestion notifications on mobile devices, follow these steps:

1. Open the Facebook app and open the menu by tapping your profile icon on the top right.

2. In the section below “See more,” you will find the Settings & privacy option. Select that to bring up another sub-menu, and then tap on Settings.

3. This brings you to the settings page. Scroll down until you find the Notifications option and select it.

4. Now you will see another list with all the notification categories listed. A little way down, select the People you may know category.

5. You will see multiple toggles that control the notifications sent through various methods. Simply tap the topmost one to disable them entirely.

6. The toggle will get greyed out, indicating that the friend suggestion notifications are now disabled on your account.

Is There No Way to Completely Stop Friend Suggestions on Facebook?

We have seen how to block the People You May Know notifications on both the web and mobile Facebook app, but what about the in-app suggestions you get while scrolling Facebook? Is there no way to turn these off?

Yes and no. While there is an option to disable these, it only blocks the suggestions for a while. After some time, you will notice that the recommendations will start showing again.

1. To temporarily stop the integrated suggested friends on Facebook, scroll down your news feed until you come across the People you may know snippet.

2. Click (or tap if you are on mobile) on the three-dot menu. This brings you two options – just select Hide people you may know, and the in-app friend suggestions will disappear for a while.

How Facebook Generates Its Friend Suggestions?

Facebook is well known for the amount of personal information it makes available. For example, anyone can track your location with Facebook Messenger.

Only Facebook knows the exact algorithm used to generate its friend suggestions, but the source of its data is the same– your personal information. Depending on how much information you have shared on the platform, it has quite a lot to interpolate from. At its simplest, the algorithm tries to match you to mutual friends from your friend list or members in the same groups.

But then it starts digging deeper. Your synced phone contacts are the first stop since there’s a good chance you want to connect with them. Then it starts looking at your profile – your workplace, the schools you have graduated from, and even your location to find people with the same places listed in their profile information.

That’s not all. The algorithm also keeps track of your Facebook activity, including the posts you have liked or commented on, and suggests the people who have made those posts or are engaging with them.

And the worst part is that you cannot stop this. Even the methods we have explored in this guide can only block the notifications – you will still get in-app suggestions in your news feed. There is an option to disable these as well, but the effect is temporary – after a while, you will start seeing a suggested friend pop in while you browse your news feed.

Setting your profile to private doesn’t even stop the dedicated stalker (there are ways to view private profiles), let alone Facebook’s own algorithm. And while you can keep track of who is observing your Facebook profile, there is no way to know what the algorithm is documenting.

Conclusion

While there is no way to stop Facebook’s friend suggestions coompletely, even cutting down the frequency of these suggestions (and stopping the irritating alerts) is a much-needed step.

The easiest way is to disable the People You May Know feature from the settings menu, blocking the notifications sent to your inbox. This setting is present on both the web app and the native mobile apps, including iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows.

Don’t worry – if you like discovering people through these suggestions, you will still see them elsewhere while using Facebook. This form is far less intrusive than notifications, and you can directly send a friend request to the suggested friend.