Why do we delete friends from Facebook? Science explains

Political Conflicts and Too Many Posts: Some friends are much more likely than others to fall out of their virtual network.

People have, on average, 338 Facebook friends - far more than they are able to maintain in real life. It's easier to say "yes" than "no" when you receive a friend request on the network, and so we are accumulating hundreds of virtual colleagues. Now the researchers are trying to understand the opposite phenomenon: what is behind the urge to break a friendship on Facebook?

Christopher Sibona of the University of Colorado in Denver decided to investigate which friends have a better chance of not being cyber-whored of friendships. He interviewed over 1,000 users in the Zuckerberg network to come up with an answer.

The conclusion was that the biggest enemy of their Facebook friends is the passage of time. High school friends rank first in virtual relationships that are broken. In the top 5 were also the professional contacts, from co-workers to clients and suppliers. But the reasons for cutting these people out of their online lives are very different.

According to the survey, we deleted high school friends for two main reasons: they post radical content on politics and religion or make a large number of posts on irrelevant subjects. Sibona's theory is that we are less tolerant of the bullshit posted by this kind of old friendship. "It's possible that in high school people would not know one another's political and religious positions. It is also possible that one or both of them have changed their visions since that time, "the study says.

There is also a third possibility: his "friends" of the college have never been so friends. When two people share a social context (they work in the same company, or study at the same institution), they become friends online for "social surveillance" - basically to know what other people in this environment are doing. When school or college is over, it's no longer so interesting to know what schoolboys the classmates went for Friday night, and there is not a strong enough reason to keep that profile on your network.