“Friending and Following on Social Media[1]” encompasses various actions and behaviours on social networking platforms. Friending refers to the act of adding someone to a friend list, allowing reciprocal communication and privileges. On the other hand, Following, commonly seen on platforms like Twitter[3] et Instagram[2], entails subscribing to another user’s updates without necessarily having to be their friend. The phenomena of unfollowing or blocking someone allows for one-sided connections or disconnections. The ethical implications, public perception, and professional boundaries surrounding these actions are often discussed, and can vary greatly depending on profession, region, and individual network. Additionally, scholarly research and legal cases provide further insights into the dynamics and repercussions of friending and following on social media.
Friending is the act of adding someone to a list of "friends" on a service de réseau social. The notion does not necessarily involve the concept of friendship. It is also distinct from the idea of a "fan"—as employed on the WWW sites of businesses, bands, artists, and others—since it is more than a one-way relationship. A "fan" only receives things. A "friend" can communicate back to the person friending. The act of "friending" someone usually grants that person special privileges (on the service) with respect to oneself. On Facebook, for example, one's "friends" have the privilege of viewing and posting to one's "timeline".
Following is a similar concept on other social network services, such as Twitter et Instagram, where a person (follower) chooses to add content from a person or page to their newsfeed. Unlike friending, following is not necessarily mutual, and a person can unfollow (stop following) or block another user at any time without affecting that user's following status.
The first scholarly definition and examination of friending and defriending (the act of removing someone from one's friend list, also called unfriending) was David Fono and Kate Raynes-Goldie's "Hyperfriendship and beyond: Friends and Social Norms on LiveJournal" from 2005, which identified the use of the term as both a noun and a verb by users of early social network site and blogging platform LiveJournal, which was originally launched in 1999.