If you're a Facebook user, you probably have at least one former schoolmate who can't seem to stop overwhelming your News Feed with political rants or unnecessary personal life updates. You also probably thought of unfriending them, sometimes actually doing it.

In reality, it seems that former high school friends are unfriended more than any other group on Facebook, according to a recent study by Christopher Sibona, a doctoral student at the University of Colorado Denver. For the study, Sibona separated Facebook friends into 15 distinct "types": neighbors, church friends, friends of friends, etc. He surveyed 1,077 people online to figure out who they unfriend on Facebook and why.

Sibona found his survey participants by searching for people who had publicly complained about being Facebook unfriended on Twitter. He then asked them the last person they unfriended and the last person who unfriended them. Old high school classmates topped those lists:



High school friends tend to drift apart, online and offline. Respondents who said they recently unfriended a high school friend said that the person they unfriended tended to either publish frequently about "polarizing" political or religious topics or update their status with "unimportant," trivial posts.

[Physorg]