When your boss sends you a friend request on Facebook, accepting it does not mean handing over a front-row seat to your weekend in Ibiza. You can stay friends and still choose who sees your posts.
For an occasional post, choose Friends except… in the audience menu. For a friend you regularly want to keep out of your personal updates, the Restricted list may be a better fit. Neither makes your public activity private.
Hide one post
Friends except… lets you exclude selected friends from that post.
Keep a friend at arm’s length
The Restricted list keeps you friends while limiting what they can see.
Share with a small circle
Specific friends lets you choose the friends who can see a post.
1Hide a Facebook post from selected friends
These instructions are for ordinary posts on your personal profile. Pages, groups, Stories and Reels have their own sharing controls.
On a computer
- At the top of your Feed or profile, click What’s on your mind? and prepare your post.
- Click the audience button beneath your name. It may say Friends, Public or another audience. You are looking for the sharing choice, not necessarily the word “Public”.
- Select Friends except….
- Search for and select the friends you want to exclude. The people you select here are the ones who must not see this post.
- Click Done to confirm your selection, then check the Post audience screen. If you only mean to change this post, do not select Set as default audience. Click Done again where shown.
- Back in the composer, check the audience beneath your name before clicking Post.
Tap or click the image to enlarge.
On a phone
- In the Facebook app, tap What’s on your mind?.
- Tap the audience beneath your name.
- Choose Friends except…. Expand the audience choices if necessary.
- Select the friends to exclude, then confirm using the Done or save control shown in your app.
- Check the audience back on your post before publishing. If Facebook offers a default-audience option, leave it off for a one-off change.
Button names and the number of confirmation screens can differ between Android, iPhone and Facebook versions.
Check the next post too. Meta says a one-post audience change returns to your saved default next time. The desktop menu also offers a separate default-audience checkbox. Do not assume that excluding somebody once excludes them forever.
2Use the Restricted list for an ongoing boundary
If you want to remain Facebook friends but keep your everyday personal posts to yourself, add that friend to your Restricted list.
On a computer
- Go to the friend’s profile.
- Click Friends near the top.
- Choose Edit friend list.
- Select Restricted and confirm if prompted.
On a phone: open their profile, tap Friends → Edit friend lists → Restricted, then tap Done where shown.
They remain your friend, but can still see public information and posts you tag them in. Ordinary Friends-only posts are hidden from restricted friends. Posting something as Public defeats the point, so keep checking that audience button.
To review the list on a computer, open Friends → Custom lists → Restricted. You may need See more to find Friends. You can remove someone from the list there.
Restricted is not the same as unfollowing. Unfollowing changes what you see from them. It does not stop them seeing your posts. Restricting someone in Messenger is a separate messaging feature too.
3What about posts you have already published?
Changing the audience for a new post does not go back and rewrite the audience on all your old ones.
- Open your profile and find the post.
- Click or tap its audience icon beside the date or time. Depending on your app, the three-dot menu may offer Edit audience.
- Choose Friends except… and exclude the relevant friend, or choose Only me if you want the post visible only to you.
- Confirm the change and check the post’s audience.
“Limit past posts” has a different job
This tool reduces eligible older posts shared more widely than Friends, such as Public posts, to Friends. It does not create a “Friends except this person” rule.
On a computer, Meta’s current route is profile picture → Settings and privacy → Settings → Posts → Limit who can see past posts → Limit past posts. If the menu differs, search Settings for Limit past posts.
Read the confirmation carefully. There is no one-click undo for the bulk change. Existing custom audiences are not changed, tagging can retain additional access, and this does not change the audience of somebody else’s post.
4Share with specific friends or a list
Sometimes it is easier to choose who can see a post. Select Specific friends in the audience menu, choose your people and confirm. That is useful for family photos or a discussion that would bore everyone outside the Bonsai Club rigid.
On the desktop menu checked for this update, Custom also lets you include or exclude friends and lists, and existing custom lists appear among the audience choices. Read more in Facebook Lists for Newsfeed Preferences.
An audience is permission to see a post, not a delivery guarantee. Selecting a list does not force Facebook to put your post in everybody’s Feed. The old version of this article suggested otherwise, so that needed putting right.
5A few privacy catches worth knowing
- Public still means public. These tools do not make comments on public posts or public-group activity private.
- Watch the tags. Tagging can expand a post’s audience. Do not tag somebody you are trying to exclude, and review the audience if other people are tagged.
- Stories and Reels have separate audience settings. Check those before sharing rather than relying on an ordinary post’s setting.
- You cannot control somebody else’s audience. If they post a photo of you, their sharing settings apply. Hiding it from your profile does not remove it from Facebook.
- Private is not screenshot-proof. Somebody who can see a post can still show it to another person. If it would cause real trouble outside your chosen circle, consider whether to post it at all.
You do not have to share everything with everyone. Just give that audience button a quick look before the Ibiza photos go live. Murphy’s Law has not retired.
Sources and update notes
Checked on 18 October 2026 against Meta’s Help Centre and the live Facebook desktop post-audience menu. The desktop screenshot is current and cropped to remove personal details. No post was published and no audience or friend-list changes were saved during research.
Phone guidance follows Meta’s app help and the audience-selection process; the Android and iPhone apps were not tested directly. Menu wording and availability vary by device, account and rollout. This guide covers personal-profile posts. Older comments below may refer to earlier Facebook versions.
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Digitally Done, giving you back a little bit of control!
Good to know. Tx
Brilliant tip, thank you.
Very interesting. Thanks.
A pleasure, Albert. Thanks for the comment 🙂
Useful guide. Really helpful. Thanks.
You’re welcome, Terry 🙂
Thank you, gosh, I’ve been looking for how to do that for months!
We love comments, thanks Sean 🙂
Nice work, thanks.