How to unfriend someone on facebook without offending him or her

If you have a Facebook friend who constantly is
firing off preachy religious or contentious political
posts that are clogging up my social stream with
stuff I don't care to read. At the same time, the guy
is the dad of one of my son's best friends and I
have to see him on the sidelines of school sporting
events, so the last thing I want to do is offend him.
If this scenario sounds familiar, take heart. There
are ways to rid your Facebook News Feed of
annoying posts.
First, you can unfriend the person—Facebook will
not notify the person you have done so. Of course,
if the person starts to wonder why he or she is no
longer seeing your posts and searches for you, your
former connection will find your profile page and
see an "Add friend" box on the top of it, a dead
giveaway pointing toward what you've done.
As an alternative, you can tell Facebook to show
you fewer posts from a particular person. To do it,
click on the little drop-down arrow on the top of
something he or she has posted, then choose
"Hide." Facebook then tells you it has hidden the
story from your News Feed and gives you the
option to "Change what updates you get from (so
and so)" or "Organise who you see in news feed."
If you click on the former, you can uncheck—and
tell Facebook you don't want to receive certain
kinds of information about this person—things like
life events, status updates, photos, games,
comments and likes, music and videos and other
activity, essentially everything a person is doing on
Facebook. There's also an option to simply unfollow
a person.
If you opt to organise your News Feed, you can put
people on an acquaintances list so that their posts
show up less frequently there as well as get the
ability to share things with friends but not
acquaintances. Again, nobody will know you've put
them on this list.
But what about the people who you really care
about—the ones you want to see everything
they're doing on Facebook?
For that, click on the settings cog on the top right
of your Facebook page >>> Privacy Settings >>>
Notifications >>> Close Friends activity. From
there, you can turn on Close Friends activity and
choose whether you want to receive notifications
about what they're doing on Facebook or on email,
as well.
To make sure the right people are on your list of
close friends go back to your News Feed and click
on "Close Friends" under Friends on the left of the
page (if you don't see Friends there, you'll need to
click on "More"). Once you're on the Close Friends
page, click on Manage List >>> Edit List on the top
right of the page. You can delete people by clicking
the X on the top right of their photos, or add people
through the List Suggestions area, which is on the
right side of the page.