How to Unblock Someone on Facebook

You should never be ashamed to be heavy-handed with the block button on Facebook. Blocking someone on social media is freeing, an exercise in boundary-setting, and a beautiful way to curate a positive online experience. It also sends a message that you’re not to be trifled with. Admittedly, though, it can be done in an unthinking fit when you don’t really mean it. If you regret blocking someone on Facebook, you can undo it, but it’s not very intuitive.

What does a Facebook blocking do?

If you’ve ever been blocked on Facebook, you’ll notice that you can’t search for the other person’s profile or see their posts or comments. When you block someone on FB, that’s what you do to them: You make yourself completely inaccessible. They can’t find you at all.

Blocking is the easy part. You navigate to their profile, hit the triple-dot menu under their cover photo on the bottom right, and smash that block button. 

Credit: Lindsey Ellefson/Meta

How to unblock someone on Facebook

To unblock the person, you have to do a little more work:

1. Navigate to your own profile by clicking your profile picture in the top right.
2. Hit “Settings & privacy,” then “Settings.”
3. Look in the right column for “Privacy,” then click that.
4. Hit “Blocking.”
5. In the “Block Users” section, find “Edit” and click it, then “See your blocked list.”
6. You’ll see the list of everyone you’ve blocked and can click “Unblock” next to the former offender, then click “Confirm” to go through with it.

Credit: Lindsey Ellefson/Meta

Note that in some cases, “Blocking” may appear as soon as you hit “Settings,” depending if it falls in your “Most visited settings.”

What to keep in mind about unblocking on Facebook

When you block (or unblock someone) they won’t get a notification about it, so they may not be aware that they were ever blocked. Unfortunately, after you unblock them, they won’t be re-added to your friends list automatically; you’ll need to send a new friend request if you want them to be back on your list of connections. If they didn’t know they got blocked, this could tip them off. 

Credit: Lindsey Ellefson/Meta

Also, if you unblock someone, you won’t be able to reblock them again for two days, so make sure you really want them unblocked before you go through with it. Even if they aren’t your Facebook friend, they can still see your public posts once they’re unblocked.