How-To

How to Hide or Customize Your Facebook Friends List Visibility

By Jeff Butts

Updated March 1, 2024

If you’re wondering how you can change your Facebook friends list visibility, we’ve got answers. Find the steps to do that here.

Let’s face it, Facebook can be a Pandora’s box of privacy threats and concerns. Keeping yourself safe on Facebook requires much more than just routinely changing your password. That’s why Meta is often adding new privacy features, but sometimes the additions and changes only result in more chaos. That being said, Facebook does allow you to do things like stop the platform from suggesting your name in photos and restrict the visibility of your list of friends and followers. Let’s look at how to do the latter, hide or customize your Facebook friends list visibility.

Setting Your Facebook Friends List Visibility on Your Mobile Device

1. Open the Facebook app on your iPhone or Android device.
2. Tap your profile picture at the bottom-right of the screen.
   
3. Next, tap the Settings (gear) icon.
   
4. Scroll down to Audience & visibility, then tap How people find and contact you.
   
5. Select the dropdown menu beside Who can see your friends list.
   
6. Choose your desired audience from the menu.
   

As you’ll see in the next section, the mobile app offers you more options to customize who can see your friends list on Facebook. If you want to selectively hide the list from certain Facebook friends, be sure to do the changes in the iPhone or Android app.

How to Change the Visibility of Your Friends List on Facebook

Facebook has chosen to place the settings in a different location if you’re using the webpage in a browser. Here’s how to find the options.

1. Click your profile picture in the top-right corner of the page.
   
2. Click Settings & privacy.
   
3. In the next menu, select Settings.
   
4. Scroll down the left sidebar and click Profile details under Audience & visibility.
   
5. Your Facebook profile appears. Scroll down to Friends, then click the three-dots menu button > Edit privacy.
   
6. The Edit privacy menu allows you to specify the visibility of your Facebook friends list, who can see the people and pages you follow, and who can see your followers on your timeline. Select the button beside the one you wish to change.
   
7. For the audience, choose from Public, Friends, or Only me to hide the information from everyone. You can also choose Custom if you want to have more fine-tuned control over visibility.
   
8. Once finished, click Done to return to the previous menu, then the X in the top-right corner.

Nothing Is Permanent Except Change

When Heraclitus first coined that phrase, he might have had Facebook in mind (except that the Greek philosopher died more than 2,500 years ago). The social media network certainly is prone to moving and renaming settings. That being said, the steps above should help you know what to look for when you want to change the visibility of your friends list on Facebook.

If you find the settings have changed, we kindly ask that you let us know in the comments. We’ll be sure to get it sorted out.