Bot and fake followers on X (Twitter): how to spot and remove them

1. 1

   Open your followers list on x.com

   "Remove this follower" is on the web only, so on a phone, open x.com in your browser. How to remove a follower without blocking them has the details.

2. 2

   Remove or block the account

   Removed, a bot is no longer among your followers, isn't notified and can follow you again. Blocked, it can't follow you again.

3. 3

   Report the spam ones from the app

   On the account's profile, select the more icon, then Report. Don't look for a web form: X's spam form says "Reports about spam cannot be created using this form" and sends you to the X app, although X's page on reporting still links to it.

X describes removing followers one at a time, with no option for several at once. An app that does it for you in bulk acts as you, with the risks covered in is a tracker safe to connect.

If you'd rather not see bots, X has two filters, and neither removes anyone from your followers. The quality filter hides suspected spam accounts from your followers list until you turn it off in your settings. The advanced notification filters mute notifications from accounts that are new, have a default profile photo, or haven't confirmed an email address or phone number, among others.

X's authenticity rules say what makes a fake account: "using stock, stolen or AI-generated profile photos, copied or stolen profile bios, and/or misleading profile information for the purpose of deceiving others".

Numbers give bots away too. Here is how the followers X suspended from our users' lists compare with the people who unfollowed them, as we last saw each account:

A real person can look like that too, so take it as a hint, not proof.

Some bots say what they are. An "Automated" label under an account's name means a program runs it. Twitter started testing it in September 2021 and gave it in February 2022 to accounts their developers declared, "so you can identify more of the good bots". X's help pages still describe the label as "currently in testing", so an account without one can still be a bot.

Not when you ask: none of X's help pages describes a way to have X clear bots from your list. It removes them its own way. When it detects "suspicious levels of activity", it may lock an account until the owner gives a phone number or solves a puzzle, and locked accounts are removed from every follower count. It also suspends: 335,675,897 accounts for platform manipulation and spam from July to December 2024, according to its latest transparency report as of October 2026, all but 183,343 of them by automated systems.

Sometimes it sweeps. In April 2024 X's @Safety account announced it was "casting a wide net" against spam accounts, and shared a form for people caught by mistake to appeal. In October 2025 Nikita Bier, then head of product, wrote: "This week we purged 1.7 million bots engaging in reply spam."

Our users see it as suspensions. Of the followers they lost from May to October 2026, 2,266 were accounts X suspended, and 62 of those have followed again since. On 17 August 2026, 39 of the accounts we track lost 149 followers to suspensions in one day, when a typical day has about 9. Why counts drop, bots or not, is in why you lose followers on X.

Nor does X's fee for new accounts stop them following you. Its "Not a Bot" test, started in October 2023 for new web accounts in New Zealand and the Philippines, asks for a yearly fee to post, but an account that doesn't pay can still follow you.

It's your call. No X source says bot followers lower a real account's reach. In 2018, Twitter's post denying that it shadow bans listed who follows you among the signals it used to spot bad-faith accounts when ranking search results, without saying how much it counted.

You can have bots without buying any. SparkToro's 2022 study of fake followers says they gather around very large accounts, accounts in the news and accounts Twitter recommended to new users.

Nobody outside X knows, and the estimates differ because the definitions do.

Twitter's 5% became famous in May 2022, when Elon Musk put his purchase of the company "temporarily on hold" until Twitter showed how it was calculated.

A checker's percentage is a model's estimate. SparkToro's free checker scored a sample of several thousand of your followers with a model trained on 35,000 fake followers the company bought in July 2018; its address now leads to SparkToro's home page. Indiana University's Botometer went offline after Twitter ended free data access for researchers. Since February 2024, Botometer X shows only scores calculated from data collected before 31 May 2023, so newer accounts have none. A 2020 study in PLOS ONE found Botometer's scores "imprecise", especially in a language other than English.

We don't score your followers. We tell you, by DM, which followers left and which of them X suspended.

X's rules are: its authenticity policy forbids "compensating others to conduct account metric inflation", follows included, and "using or promoting third-party services" to do it. Enforcing it on buyers is another matter. In 2018, when The New York Times reported that a company called Devumi had sold more than 200 million Twitter followers, a Twitter spokeswoman said the company did not typically suspend users suspected of buying bots, in part because it was hard to know who had paid.

In the US, it can be the law too. New York's attorney general settled with Devumi in January 2019, the first finding by a law enforcement agency that selling fake engagement is illegal. The FTC settled its own case that October. Since 21 October 2024, an FTC rule forbids buying fake followers you knew or should have known were fake, to look more influential for a commercial purpose. The FTC says individuals buying them without a commercial purpose are outside the rule.