The bar chart illustrates the main reasons why people choose to add or remove friends on a popular social media platform.
Overall, people are far more likely to add friends because of real-life connections and mutual friends, while unfriending is mainly driven by negative online behavior, particularly offensive comments. Reasons related to popularity or appearance play a relatively minor role.
Looking first at the reasons for adding friends, the most common factor is knowing someone in real life, at just over 80%. This is followed by having mutual friends, which accounts for around 60%. In contrast, professional reasons such as business networking are much less significant, at approximately 10%. Factors like attractiveness and increasing friend count are the least influential, both remaining below 10%.
In terms of unfriending, offensive comments are the leading cause, with slightly more than half of users choosing to remove contacts for this reason. Not knowing someone well is the second most common factor, at around 40%. Other reasons include excessive self-promotion and depressing content, which account for roughly 35% and 20% respectively. A lack of interaction is the least common reason, at just under 20%.