Learn how to remove non-friends from your Facebook Messenger chats and adjust settings to prevent them from showing up again.
You may see people you’re not friends with in the Messenger sidebar on desktop and mobile. This is by design, to help you and potential friends find each other faster on Facebook, but some may find this overbearing and an invasion of privacy.
Why do non-friends show up in my Messenger chat?
If you at some point granted Facebook or Messenger permission to access your iPhone’s address book, Meta now has your entire contact list. The company leverages this information to suggest folks from your address book whom you haven’t already friended on Facebook. These suggestions also appear in the Messenger sidebar as “Other” friends.
On old iOS and macOS versions, signing in to Facebook in the Settings app (iPhone, iPad) or System Preferences (Mac) automatically grants Meta permission to upload your address book.
How to remove your contacts from Facebook
Now that you’ve learned how they got there, it’s time to learn how to remove them. It’s pretty simple. Log in to Facebook using your favorite browser, then visit the Facebook Messenger contacts page in another tab and click Delete all contacts at page bottom. Be sure to log out of Facebook on all your devices, then sign back in again for the changes to take effect.
You should no longer see non-friends in the Messenger sidebar as you just dissociated any previously uploaded contacts with the system. Logging out and then logging back in also helps clear Facebook’s caches. If you don’t do this, non-friends may still show up in your Messenger chats for a while or until the page refreshes.
Keep these people from coming back
Now that you’ve outsmarted Meta, be sure to keep it that way by making sure neither Facebook nor Messenger have access to your address book. Navigate to Settings > Privacy & Security > Contacts and choose Facebook, then select None. Repeat this for Messenger and Instagram.
Facebook, Messenger and Instagram will no longer periodically download your address book. As a result, “Other” friends that always appeared in the Messenger sidebar will no longer be visible. If you don’t see Facebook, Messenger or Instagram listed there, the app hasn’t yet requested permission to access your contacts. In that case, open the app and don’t allow contacts access when a permission prompt pops up
If you reinstall Facebook, Messenger, or Instagram in the future after deleting, be sure to follow the steps above to stop these apps from accessing your contacts.
Also, check out: How to turn off your online active status on Facebook and Messenger