World Travel Zone: How to Find Out if Someone's Blocked You on Facebook

Steps

Consider the alternatives. The steps below will outline some scenarios where it's likely that you've been blocked, but there's no guarantee. If your alleged blocker has been temporarily blocked for violating Facebook policies, this could be a reason you're not able to see them. It could also be that the person has deactivated or deleted their account altogether.
Note whether you've received a message from this person lately. If you are blocked, they will not receive your messages at all. So, if a person does respond to a message you sent, you are not blocked. If they don't respond, you may or may not be blocked. Either they aren't receiving your messages because they've blocked you, or they're just ignoring your messages. Continue with your investigation.
Search for the person while you are logged in. If you can find them, then you can rest assured that you haven't been blocked. (When someone blocks you, it prevents you from finding them on Facebook.) If you can't find them, it may be that you are blocked, or it may be that they have their privacy settings adjusted so they can't be found.
- Don't bother searching for this person while logged into a different account. If you find them through that account and not through yours, it could be for a variety of reasons:
  - If the account you're using isn't friends, or a friend of a friend of that person, it's just like searching for them while logged out, which is discussed in the next step.
  - If the account you're using IS friends, or a friend of a friend of that person, and you find them through that account but not through yours, it may just mean they have their privacy setting adjusted so they can only be found by those people (friends, or friends of friends). It doesn't necessarily mean you've been blocked.
Search for the person on Facebook while logged out. If you can find them while logged out but not while logged in, it means they have their settings so they can be searched by everyone except you. That means you've been blocked.
Google them. Google is the most widely used search engine, so give it a go to see if it has knowledge of this possibly blocked friend.
- Log out of your Facebook account.
- Search for the person's known Facebook name inside quotation marks. For example, 'Brad Pitt', 'Daisy F Football', etc.
- If there is a search engine return, click on it.
- In a separate window, log into Facebook. Go back to that search engine result and click on it again. Is it different? Does it show you something different than what you saw before? Does it tell you that profile doesn't exist? If so, you're probably blocked.
- If the friend doesn't come up in search results, don't jump to any conclusions. It could be that they adjusted their setting so their profile can't be crawled by search engines, or their profile simply hasn't been indexed by Google yet.
C'mon guys! Which one of you blocked me?!
Ask others. At the risk of looking desperate, angry, or just plain nosy, you could consider asking other people if they know whether something's up. This method will depend entirely on whether or not you feel comfortable asking others and are able to handle the ramifications of your mutual friend knowing you've been blocked:
- Ask mutual friends online. Ask them if the possible blocker is still appearing actively on their Facebook feed. An affirmative answer is all you need to know you've been blocked.
- Ask friends offline. If you're in a close-knit group of friends offline and it's one of your offline friends who seems to have blocked you, ask your friends if they know anything. Again, you need to be ready for answers you might not like hearing and it could mean that more is up for your personal friendship than you're willing to grasp!
Be attentive. None of the following are 'proofs' in and of themselves but they might help you to build a picture that points to your having been blocked:
- Chatter on your Facebook wall that seems to be involving your possibly blocked friend, or doesn't make sense without him or her being part of the updates.
- Check your own updates and see if you have said anything that might have been potentially offensive or upsetting to your supposed blocker. You will often have a gut feeling about this if you know their leanings and feelings well.
- Check their Twitter name if you know it. If they're still pointing to a Facebook address or leaving tweets about using their Facebook, that's a sign they're still actively using Facebook and that you might have been blocked.
- Check any other mutually followable accounts you have where you know this person has an account. For example, Twitter, YouTube, Ping, LinkedIn, etc. Have they removed you from mutual following on any of these? If so, you might be at the receiving end of a very big message...
Fake it. This is not a very efficient method and may not work simply because the person who has blocked you is discerning about accepting friendship requests. However, if you're desperate, give it a try:
- Make a fake or decoy account on Facebook. Make yourself likable, find a photo on Flickr Creative Commons, etc., and give yourself hobbies or interests you think this person would like.
- Send this person a friend request.
- Wait. You might be waiting forever. But if they take the bait, you've just discovered a block on your real account!
Use a third party application. There are some applications online that claim to help in your pursuit of the blocker. Use a search engine to find them. And consider whether you really need to go to this trouble!
Set aside paranoia, irritation, or worry. If another person decides to block you, how much are you willing to let this interfere with your personal life? Facebook is just another way to communicate with people and in the real world, sometimes people shun you for the most bizarre reasons of their own and you just have to learn to live with it. Facebook is no different! Try to see it with a good heart and without taking it personally:
- Some social media users suffer from narcissistic tendencies that cause them to take slight easily and to feel superior.^[1] This could lend them to readily dropping 'friends' if they feel put out. If you've been entangled with one, perhaps the blocking is a blessing.
- Some social media users have a sudden urge that drives them to clean out their friends in the hope they can control an online addiction/overuse or simply to 'cut out all of the noise'. It's not likely you're going to change their mind when this is the reason behind a block. Take comfort in knowing that if this is the reason for a block, then you're probably not the only person they blocked.
- Think very carefully about what knowing who has blocked you will bring about. It's not as if you can claim mutual satisfaction by blocking them back – they won't care! If it makes you so angry or annoyed that you need to be rude to them or say unkind things to mutual friends about them, then perhaps there was substance to their desire to blocking you. It's best to leave it be and think 'who cares?!'.

Tips

If you can still access your friend through other means (for example, Twitter or an email), sometimes it pays to tread carefully, swallow your pride and ask your friend for reasons in case there has been a misunderstanding, an error, or something that can be mended. On the other hand, if your friend either fails to respond, or responds negatively to you, be ready to move on.
This is the text of the Facebook message when you can't get through: 'The page you requested was not found. You may have clicked an expired link or mistyped the address. Some web addresses are case sensitive. Return home. Go back to the previous page.'

Warnings

Facebook can temporarily block you or another user from accessing parts of the site for 'misuse'. Don't confuse a personal block from someone with one caused by you or the other person doing something that raised the ire of Facebook!