How to tell if someone is hiding something from you on Facebook

Facebook doesn’t have a one size fits all approach to their security and privacy settings.

They allow each and every user on the platform to personalise these settings in order to gain a level of security on their account that they are happy with, as opposed to a blanket approach which would leave some users unsatisfied.

Users are able to edit their privacy settings in relation to a whole host of things, including who can see your posts, who can comment on your posts and even who can see your friends list.

As a result, it may well turn out that certain users on the app are hiding their activity from you.

In this article, we are going to look at how someone would go about doing this and also examine whether it’s possible for you to find out whether someone is hiding certain things from your or not. Let’s get into it.

How to tell if someone is hiding something from you on Facebook – Is it possible?

It wouldn’t be great from Facebook if they provided users with a page which allowed you to see who has edited their privacy settings to hide things from you.

What good would privacy settings be if the platform then went and told everyone what your privacy settings were?

As a result, there is no concrete way of knowing for sure whether someone is hiding content from you or not.

Therefore, if you are looking to find out whether someone is hiding anything from you on Facebook you are going to need to do a little bit of investigative work yourself.

You can’t see someone’s profile picture when you’re blocked on Facebook, so this is a good way to tell whether you’ve been blocked or not.

The first thing that you should do is to take a look through the Facebook user’s profile. If you can remember any of their old posts but now can’t see them then it may well be that they have selected to hide their posts from you.

It could also be that they’ve just deleted some of their old posts though, so this isn’t concrete enough for you to conclude that you have been hidden.

Another tactic that some people deploy is to ask a mutual friend to have a look through the user’s profile. If they can see posts that you can’t then it’s safe to assume that you have been hidden from seeing certain, or all of their posts.

If you aren’t comfortable asking a mutual friend to do this then you could always set up a secondary account on the platform, add the user in question and flick through their profile that way.

Of course, this would rely on them accepting your friend request and given that they are taking the time to hide posts from people they may not be willing to accept a friend request from an apparent stranger.

How to set up a secondary account on Facebook

Having said that, this may well still be your best way of finding out whether someone is hiding their content from you on the platform, even if the chances of having your friend request accepted are slim.

In order to set up a secondary account, please follow these steps:

  1. Log out of your Facebook account on the Facebook app.
  2. Select ‘sign up for Facebook’ on the bottom of the landing page.
  3. Select ‘get started’.
  4. Enter in all required information including your full name, date of birth and email address.
  5. Verify your new account via either email or phone number. You will have to use a different email address/phone number to the one you used to sign up for your primary Facebook account.
  6. Complete the sign up process and then send a friend request to the Facebook user in question.

How to hide your Facebook posts from certain individuals

If you are on the other side of the fence and are looking to hide some of your Facebook activity from certain users then you have a couple of options available to you.

The most straightforward way to hide your activity from someone is to simply unfriend them and/or block them.

However, if you still want to be friends with them then you will need to follow these instructions:

  1. Log on to your Facebook account via the mobile app.
  2. Select the three lined icon the bottom right hand side of the app, followed by ‘settings and privacy’ and then ‘settings’.
  3. Select ‘privacy settings’.
  4. Scroll down to ‘your activity’ and select ‘who can see your future posts?’
  5. Select ‘try it now’ and create a new Facebook post.
  6. On the first drop down tab underneath your name on ‘create post’ you are able to select ‘friends except’ or ‘specific friends’ to hone in on which friends you do or don’t want to see you Facebook posts. This change will then be in place for all future activity.
  7. If you want to backdate this change, then you go back to the previous screen and select ‘limit who can see past posts’ and then ‘limit past posts’.

Conclusion

To conclude, Facebook isn’t going to provide you with a list of people who have hidden content from you on the app, even if they’re a Facebook friend. This is because Facebook tries to keep private posts exactly what they’re named – private.

Therefore, it’s entirely up to you to figure it out using the methods we’ve discussed above. There are a few ways you may be able to find other people’s posts even if you’re on the restricted list, but it’s not that easy.

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Author

Andy

Andy is a Professional Content Editor with expertise in a whole host of areas (or so he tells us anyway). His main interests are sports, tv/film and social media. He has reviewed over 100 apps so far for Apps UK.

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