How to See Who Unfollowed You on Twitter (X)

Why X doesn’t tell you who unfollowed you

Every social network makes the same choice: celebrate follows, hide unfollows. Notifying people about lost followers would make the platform feel negative and would encourage confrontations. So X shows your follower count going down and leaves you to guess. The count itself is unreliable as a signal, because suspended and deactivated accounts also disappear from it.

The only way to know who left is to compare your follower list at two points in time. You can do that by hand for one person, with a spreadsheet for a small account, or with an app for anything larger.

Method 1: check whether a specific person unfollowed you

If you suspect a particular account, open their profile on X. If they follow you, a grey Follows you label appears next to their handle. If it is missing and you are sure it used to be there, they unfollowed you (or their account was suspended or deactivated, in which case the profile itself won’t load normally). This works for one or two people and nothing more.

Method 2: the spreadsheet method

For accounts with a few hundred followers you can do what unfollower apps do, manually:

1. Request your X data archive from Settings → Your account → Download an archive of your data. It arrives as a ZIP within a day or two and includes a follower.js file.
2. Open the file in a text editor, copy the list of account IDs into a spreadsheet column and date the column.
3. Repeat a week or a month later in a second column.
4. Use a formula such as =IF(COUNTIF(B:B, A2)=0, "Unfollowed", "") to flag IDs present in the old list but missing from the new one.

It works, but the archive gives you numeric IDs rather than handles, the request takes days, and you have to remember to do it. It is a good way to understand the mechanism and a poor way to live.

Method 3: use an unfollower tracker app

An unfollower tracker automates the comparison. Unfollow Today, a free Android app, saves a snapshot of your followers every time you open it. Anyone who was in the previous snapshot and is missing from the current one appears in the Unfollowers tab with an approximate time.

1. Download the APK and install it.
2. Sign in with your X account.
3. Let the first sync finish. This creates your baseline snapshot.
4. Open the app every few days. Each sync updates the Unfollowers and New followers lists.

Because the comparison runs on your device, your lists are never uploaded anywhere. The app also distinguishes real unfollows from accounts that were suspended or deactivated where X makes that information available.

What to do when someone unfollows you

Usually nothing. People prune their timelines for all sorts of reasons and most unfollows are not personal. That said, an unfollower list is useful for two things:

• Reciprocity clean-up. If you followed someone because they followed you and they have now left, you may want to Unfollow back. Unfollow Today offers the action directly from the list.
• Pattern spotting. Losing a cluster of followers right after a particular post tells you something about your audience. The Stats tab makes these dips visible.

What not to do: confront people, or follow and unfollow in cycles to “test” who reciprocates. The first is unpleasant and the second is the behaviour X’s rules exist to punish. If you want to tidy your following list properly, read how to mass unfollow on X safely.