Finding mutual friends

Since the disappearance of the Facebook Graph Search, we are often asked whether it is still possible to map users’ mutual friends. Despite the many changes on the Facebook side, this is indeed still possible. In this OSINT tutorial you can read how you can find a list of mutual friends of two or more Facebook users.

First of all: use a fake account

To find the mutual friends of two you must be logged in on Facebook. This means that you need an account on Facebook. We advise you to use an account that cannot be traced back to you in any way. To be able to search via the Facebook Graph Search, it was necessary to set the language settings to “English (US)“. This is not necessary for this search function. So you only need a Fake account.

Find mutual Facebook friends in 5 steps

To find the mutual friends of two or more connections, you must go through the following steps:

STEP 1: navigate to the two Facebook profiles that you wish to investigate. It is a good practive if you keep the two profiles open in two separate tabs.

STEP 2: right-click anywhere on the page of the first profile you want to investigate and select “View Page Source“. Make sure that you do not click on an image or a link, but on an “empty” page section.

STEP 3: search the source code using the find function (CTRL + F) for the term “Entity_id” (without quotes) to retrieve the Facebook user ID of your target. The ID is the number series which is immediately after “Entity_id“. Note: sometimes you first have to click with your mouse in the source code and then use the arrow key on your keyboard to move a little to the right in the text to see the code. Make a note of the number series (the user ID), as you will need this in the steps below (and in other advanced search queries on Facebook).

STEP 4: repeat step 3, but execute it now for the second profile that you want to investigate. After this step you should therefore have recorded two user IDs. You use these user IDs in the steps below.

STEP 5: To find out which mutual friends your two targets have, you must enter the following code in the URL: “www.facebook.com/browse/mutual_friends/?uid=ID1&node=ID2‘ without quotes. This code looks like this:

When you execute the code, you will see which mutual friends your two target accounts have.

THAT’S IT: you have now mapped which mutual profiles two accounts have on Facebook.

Additional notes

Finding the mutual friends of two profiles is only possible if both accounts have not protected their friend lists or if one of the two accounts has not protected its friends list. If both accounts have protected their friend lists, the mutual friends will not be visible.

It is possible to also do the same thing with more than two accounts, for example if you want to know if there are three accounts that have any mutual friends. In that case, add “&node=” after the second ID, followed by the third user ID.

Please note that if you want to perform the above searches, you must comply with the applicable laws and regulations at all times

Want to know more about research on Facebook?

Do you want to know more about how you can conduct research on Facebook? Then contact one of our specialists or register for one of our OSINT training events.