If there is anything I hate about Facebook – its “Facebook groups”. Lots of spam from friends, sadly.

The most annoying thing regarding Facebook groups is that you can’t choose any customized setting from “Privacy” or “Account”. Yes, you can disable email notifications from Facebook groups but you can’t prevent your Facebook friends from adding you to a particular Facebook group  they create or in which they are a member.

This is because whenever you add anyone to your Facebook friend list, the person gets the right to add you to a Facebook group in which he is a member of. You can’t opt out, unless of course you remove it manually from the specific “Group page”.

Unsubscribe From All Facebook Groups You Have Joined

To unsubscribe from all Facebook groups in which you have been added without any prior consent, click the “see all” link in the left sidebar. On the next page, you will see all the groups listed, as shown below:

To remove the Facebook groups from your profile, simply click the small “cross icon” next to a group name. The page will refresh asking for a final confirmation, click “Remove” on the browser overlay window. Done !

Watch the following video to learn how to remove Facebook groups permanently from your profile:

Here are a couple of more Facebook annoyances which you may want to remove:

1. Stop Facebook photo tagging and video tagging
2. How to block on unblock someone on Facebook

Prevent Spam From Facebook Groups

Now that you have learned how to remove Facebook groups easily from your profile, here are some more tips which will help you prevent spam messages from Facebook groups which you have joined.

1. Do not friend strangers

As I mentioned earlier, all your Facebook friends have the ability to add you to any Facebook group in which they are a member of. Any of your Facebook friends can create a new group and add you to it, there is no way to stop people from adding you to their groups.

Hence, it is really important that you do not accept friend requests from strangers. People you don’t know and have never interacted with before can take advantage of Facebook internal policy and abuse the system. The moment you accept an unknown friend request, the person gets the privilege to add you to any Facebook group he has created.

Thus, stay away from strangers and never accept friend requests from people you either don’t know or trust.

2. Remove annoying friends who frequently spam

If you have hundreds of Facebook friends, consider removing some people who often spam your timeline with unnecessary spam links. Doing this will ensure two things.

First, these people won’t be able to add you to spam groups and won’t be able to send you any invitations. They are completely blocked, once and for all.

Second, your news feed and timeline will be much more easy to navigate and free from unnecessary junk posts.

3. Ask Them Not to Add you to Any Facebook group You Don’t like

If you are really fed up with close friends adding you to Facebook groups all the time, here is a trick which works almost all the time.

Create a new status update and write “Please don’t add me to any of your Facebook groups. I am not interested at all”.

Next, tag those friends one by one who repeatedly add you to their Facebook groups or fan pages. Go ahead and publish the status update.

All the mutual friends will see this status update and the person who are tagged in your status update. This will ring the necessary bell on the minds of spammers, they will surely refrain from adding you to a spam group in future.