What Is National Unfriend Day? Jimmy Kimmel’s Facebook Rules For Social Media Unfriending

It’s time for a little fall cleaning of sorts. Thursday is National Unfriend Day, an unofficial social media holiday that was first announced in 2010 by ABC talk show host Jimmy Kimmel. Every year on Nov. 17, Facebook users are encouraged to purge their accounts and “unfriend” fellow users they no longer wish to follow.

This year's installment is very timely. Following Donald Trump's election to the presidency last week, social media users went into unfriending and unfollowing frenzies with many deleting others from social accounts if they voted for the president-elect Trump or his opponent Hillary Clinton.

As such, this could be the perfect year to use National Unfriend Day to cleanse social media accounts of fellow members whose political rhetoric or demoralizing posts for the past 365 days (and counting) have proven to be too much to bear.

Politics aside, there might be other reasons why you might choose to cleanse the old newsfeed: Emotional landmines in the form of posts from ex-best friends, ex-boyfriends or ex-girlfriends could vanish. Or, better yet for some, one too many cat memes from former co-workers would be no more.

In a video released by Kimmel in 2014, the host of "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" properly outlined the criteria that could lead to grounds for an “unfriending.” In 2011, Kimmel had also developed a point system that participants were to follow when unfriending. Apparently, the possibilities are humorously endless.

According to Kimmel, if users are “charged with one or more of the following offenses,” an unfriending could be in their near future. They are:

- Posting Too much

- Not spell-checking

- Too many political posts

- Writing about how you slept the night before

- Posting about how a workout went

- Weather

- Complaints about traffic

- Identifying with certain “Frozen” characters

- Posting too much about kids

- Tagging loved one in photos where everyone appears “unflattering” except for the poster

- Too many food photos

- Too many images from vacation

- One-too-many body pictures

- Photos of feet (or your feet on vacation)

- Throwback Thursday posts

- People who ruin television shows before others have had a chance to watch

- Questions that can easily be Googled

The list goes on.

“You’re on so much, how do you still have a job? We don’t want to see your band, go to your improve show, play bejeweled blitz, words with friends or hear about your 10k which you’re only running so you can post about it,” Kimmel ends with.

In an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America," Kimmel explained why he thought a day entirely devoted to unfriending people would be more positive than hurtful. It was important for everyone to “do it all together as a group, because I think people will be less hurt,” he reasoned.

So log-on and get to unfriending. Happy National Unfriend Day!