We all stay Facebook friends with foes to stalk them, according to survey

If you’re a Facebook user, you’ll most definitely have at least five people in your friends’ list that you’d never ever want to spend time with in real life, but keep them there just to stalk them, and see what they’re doing (come on, we all do it, don’t we?)

A survey of more than 2750 social media addicts has found that 68 percent of Facebook users have friends on the social network that they don’t like, and almost half would actively avoid these people in the street.

Carried out by CouponCodesPro, all respondents in the survey were asked to reveal how many Facebook friends they had at the time of the poll, and the average was 671, with an average of just 18 being considered as true friends by the Facebook users.

The poll discovered that the top reason people stayed Facebook friends with others was to snoop on what they’re doing. Other reasons were that the contact were family or a loved one’s family member, that they were a colleague or former colleague they needed to stay in contact with, or they’d cause a scene if they were deleted as a friend.

George Charles, spokesperson for CouponCodesPro.com, said: ‘The results of this study are interesting; just the fact alone that so many of us are friends with people on Facebook that we don’t really like and would go out of our way to avoid.

‘As a society, we share so much personal information on social media and there’s an increasingly overwhelming need to stay up-to-date with what everyone is up to in their lives, whether they’re our friends or not.

‘Something worth noting that is that if you’re using social media to keep an eye on what others are doing, there’s a very real chance people are doing the same to you.’

George, you’ve made us extremely paranoid.

Hayley Minn