Can you turn off Instagram's new Friends tab? Here's the bad news

If you’ve been searching for a way to disable Instagram’s new Friends list on your profile, you’re about to be disappointed. There’s no toggle, no hidden setting, and no workaround to remove it.

The Friends tab started appearing on user profiles earlier this week, and it’s causing quite a stir. It seems to have replaced the Posts counter and now sits alongside Followers and Following. Either way, the feature shows only your mutual followers (people who follow you back), and Instagram isn’t giving anyone a choice about whether to keep it or hide it.

This isn’t the same as the Friends tab in Reels, which you can actually disable through privacy settings. That feature shows what Reels your friends have liked or commented on, and you can turn off your activity visibility by going to Settings and searching for “Activity in friends tab”. But the Friends list on your profile? That’s a different story.

People aren’t happy about it. Reddit threads and X are filling up with complaints from users who find the change depressing, awkward, or just plain unnecessary. Some folks are upset that family members can now easily see their mutual connections. Others just don’t like being reminded of how few of their thousands of followers actually follow them back.

It gets worse if you were hoping this might go away soon.

Instagram appears to be rolling this out as a permanent change, not just a test. While some users report the feature disappearing and reappearing (likely due to phased rollouts and bugs), there’s no sign that Meta plans to make it optional. The company seems intent on pushing this “friends” terminology across all its platforms, mirroring Facebook’s structure.

Your only real options right now are to wait and hope Instagram adds a disable toggle after enough backlash, or just accept that your mutual follower count is now front and center on your profile. Neither option is particularly satisfying, but that’s where things stand. If you want to hide your activity in the Reels Friends tab, at least that setting exists. But for the profile Friends list? You’re stuck with it for now.

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