How can I be sure who sees what post on Facebook when I'm restricting which lists see what I post?

Question

Say I have several groups/lists of friends on Facebook.

• Group A is family
• Group B is co-workers from company B
• Group C is co-workers from company C
• Group D is friends from university
• Group E is a group I've only met online

A couple of friends are members of more than one group (e.g. we were colleagues at more than one company).

By default when I post, I post to all my friends except family, so that's groups B, C, D and E.

Now say I want to restrict a post further so that neither family nor co-workers from Company C see it.

Will the friend who's in both Groups B and C still see the post? Which group takes precedence, the included group or the excluded group?

Answer 1

The inclusion filter is applied first, then members of the exclusion filter are removed from the post’s audience. The exclusion filter wouldn’t be of much use if it was overridden by the inclusion filter.

This is how Friends Except Acquaintances works, for instance. Acquaintances doesn’t get overridden by its superset Friends. The same goes for the Restricted group, which is applied implicitly to the exclusion filter of every non-Public post.

In your case, you would post to Friends. Then, in the Except list, you would put groups A and C.

Alternatively (and provided all your friends are in those 5 groups), you could post to groups B, D and E, keeping the same exclusion filter, and get the same result. The main reason you’d want to do this is if you want to hide those posts from future, uncategorized friends.

If you want to verify this, you can create a dummy post, then use Facebook’s View As… feature under your profile’s … menu:

Then type in the name of a person in group C: