How to export your X (Twitter) followers list

X has export buttons, just not for this: its app's text has them for post analytics and for X Money transactions, and none for followers. So you go around it:

On x.com, open More, then Settings and privacy, then Your account, then Download an archive of your data. X asks for your password and a code, then you click "Request data". X's app says preparing it can take "24 hours or longer". When it's ready, download it before it "expires in a few days", or you'll have to ask again. Comparing two archives by hand has every step.

Your followers are in data/follower.js, and the accounts you follow in following.js. X's help page says the archive includes a list of your followers, but not what it looks like. The README.txt file X puts inside the archive does: each follower is an accountId, a number, and a userLink. There's no @handle, no name and no date. Archives made in 2026 still look like that.

To turn a number into a name, type x.com/i/user/ followed by the number: x.com/i/user/783214 opens @X. The userLink beside each number opens the profile too, though X's README warns it may not work for protected or deactivated accounts. With a few dozen followers that's fine; with a few thousand, it's not an export.

The archive didn't always hold your followers. The first one, in December 2012, held your Tweets. The followers and following lists appear on Twitter's help page about your data between 22 and 29 May 2018, the week Europe's GDPR took effect.

X's API returns followers with their @handles, 1,000 per request, and allows 300 requests every 15 minutes. Speed isn't the limit; the price is. From X's pricing page, read in October 2026:

The cheaper rate, which X calls Owned Reads, started on 20 April 2026. It applies only when the account you read is the one signed in and also owns the developer app, so a service that reads your list for you pays the full rate. X gives $20 of credit when a developer account that has never paid saves its first credit or debit card, enough for 20,000 of your own followers; X says these credits are still rolling out and expire after three months.

A service that uses the API can't hand you everything it reads. X's Developer Policy lets it give each person "up to 500 public Posts Objects and/or User Objects" a day, as a download such as a spreadsheet, and otherwise only IDs.

For a while there was no self-serve way to buy this. In June 2023, X's changelog announced "we are removing the Follows and List Follows endpoints from the Basic and Pro tiers", and in August 2023 X's staff confirmed on its developer forum that they weren't in the Free tier either. Follower lists are back in pay-per-use, which X launched in February 2026.

Most export tools are Chrome extensions that read X's site from the tab where you're logged in. Prices as listed on 11 October 2026:

X's rules don't name extensions, but they cover what they do. Its Terms of Service, in force since 9 October 2026, say "crawling or scraping the Services in any form, for any purpose without our prior written consent is expressly prohibited". Its automation rules, written mainly for developers, say "scripting the X website" may result in "the permanent suspension of your account." The store listing of one extension above says it plainly: "To avoid being flagged by Twitter's risk control for frequent data exports, we suggest creating a dedicated Twitter account for exporting data."

An extension also runs inside your signed-in X tab, so it can do anything you can: is an unfollow tracker safe to connect?

X has fought scraping for years. On 1 July 2023 Elon Musk capped how many posts an account could read in a day, at 300 to 6,000 depending on the account, "To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation", and raised the caps later that day. Trackers that sold exports paid for Twitter's 2023 API prices too: Unfollower Stats, which sold "Export Followers/Followings" from $4.99 a month, closed in April 2023, saying Twitter's new API plans "will not work for our operations".

Once we've checked your account, open Settings, go to "Your data" and choose "Export as CSV" or "Export as JSON". The export is free on every plan, and it holds:

• Your followers, each with their @handle, name, follower and following counts, whether you follow them back, and when they probably followed you.
• The accounts you follow, and whether each one follows you, if you follow no more than twice your plan's follower limit (4,000 on Free).
• Every unfollow we've recorded, with its date.
• Your follower and following counts at each check.

The CSV opens in Excel or Google Sheets with accents intact, and a cell that starts with =, +, - or @ is escaped, so the spreadsheet can't run it as a formula.

It's the list from our last check, not a live read from X, and on Free we check once a month. We read your followers by your username through a data provider, which our privacy policy names, not through your X session. We only keep a check that finds nearly everyone X counts: at most 5 missing at 1,000 followers, and at most 100 on large accounts. Free covers accounts under 2,000 followers. Past that, or more than 10% past a paid plan's limit, we stop checking, so there's no current list to export.