Your Racist, Shilling, Sad Sack Status Updates Are Why People Keep Unfriending You

Wondering why everyone unfriended you on Facebook? Most likely it's because you're really offensive. But it might be because you're really depressing!

Yes, Nielsen's done a new study trying to figure out why people friend and unfriend each other on Facebook, and, well, if you've ever unfriended anyone you can probably guess how people answered. The number-one reason for unfriending a person is "offensive comments"—there's no further explanation, so the time I unfriended my brother for posting a link to a Thomas Friedman column probably counts—at 55 percent, followed by "don't know well" at 41 percent and "trying to sell me something" at 39 percent.

And then it gets good, i.e., it gets petty: 23 percent of people unfriend for depressing comments; 20 percent for "lack of interaction" (sorry, dead people!); 14 percent for "political comments"; 11 percent for "breakup/divorce"; 8 percent for "don't like their friends" (you just chuckled in recognition, didn't you?); "update profile too often" and "they add too many people" tied at 6 percent and "they don't update often enough" coming in last at 3 percent.

So! Taking data from that list and cross-referencing it against the reasons people add friends ("physical attractiveness" comes in fourth place at 8 percent), we've come up with the formula that will mean you will never be unfriended on Facebook:

  • Be a really hot, really boring person who updates your Facebook profile frequently.

And if you want to lose all your friends immediately, just post the following status update every five minutes for a week:

  • Why can't [members of racial group] be more like [members of other racial group] and vote for [political party]? Buy my ebook on the topic so that I won't have to kill myself.

[Nielsen Media, image via Shutterstock]