How to Hide Your Friends List on Facebook
Hide your Facebook friends list from public view, or from specific people, without unfriending anyone. The setting that controls it and what it does not hide.
Updated
Quick answer
Where to click
- Your profile
- Friends tab
- Edit
- audience icon (top right of the friends box)
- Your profile
- Friends
- three-dot menu
- Edit Privacy
Facebook renames these menus periodically. If a label does not match, read the screen you are on rather than forcing this exact wording.
Change the audience to Only me to hide the list from everyone, or to Friends to hide it from the public while friends can still see it.
Why people hide this
The friends list is a common surface for two problems: social-engineering (an attacker builds a fake profile impersonating you, then friend-requests your actual friends, who accept because the friends list "confirms" mutual connections) and simple exposure (employers, exes, or strangers mapping your social circle from a public list). Hiding it does not require unfriending anyone — it is purely a visibility setting.
What the setting does and does not do
It does:
- Remove the friends list tab's contents from whoever falls outside the audience you chose.
- Apply retroactively — past visibility does not matter, only the current setting.
It does not:
- Hide *you* from other people's public friends lists. That is controlled by their setting, independently. If you want to disappear from friends' public lists too, you would need to ask them to change theirs, or unfriend.
- Prevent someone from seeing mutual friends in some contexts (like a friend request screen), which uses a narrower, harder-to-suppress signal than the full list.
- Change who can send you requests or messages — that is a separate setting under How people find and contact you.
The impersonation angle specifically
If the reason you are hiding the list is that a fake profile is impersonating you: hiding your real list slows them down but does not stop the fake profile itself. Report the impersonating account directly — Facebook has a dedicated flow for this under the profile's three-dot menu → Find support or report — and warn a few close friends directly so word spreads faster than the fake requests do.
Related settings worth checking at the same time
Hiding the friends list is usually one step in a broader cleanup. If that is the goal, the privacy settings checklist covers the rest — post audience, tag review, and search visibility — in one pass, and locking your profile applies several of these at once if it is available in your region.
Official source
Meta's friends list privacy documentation covers current audience options. The settings shown on your own profile are the final authority.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Can I hide my friends list from everyone but keep it visible to me?
- Yes. The audience for your friends list can be set to Only me, which hides it from every other viewer, including friends, while you can still see it yourself.
- Does hiding my friends list hide me from their lists?
- No, not automatically. Each direction is controlled by that person's own settings. If a friend's list is public, you appearing on it depends on their setting, not yours.
- Will mutual friends still be visible to people I'm not friends with?
- If your list audience is Only me or Friends, non-friends see nothing, including mutual-friend counts on some views.
- Does this affect who I can be tagged with or added to groups by?
- No. Hiding the list is a visibility setting only. It does not change who can send requests, add you to groups, or tag you — those are separate controls.