How to see who someone recently followed on X (Twitter)

1. 1

   Open their profile

   You need to be signed in. Logged out, X shows the profile with its Following and Followers counts, but opening either list sends you to its log-in page (our test, October 2026).

2. 2

   Tap Following

   It's the number under their bio. If X keeps the order its API used, the accounts they followed last come first.

3. 3

   Read it from the top

   If that order holds, an account higher in the list was followed after the ones below it. X doesn't promise it, and there's no date next to any of them.

Protected accounts are a gap in X's help pages: they cover protected posts, which only approved followers can read, and say nothing about who can see the Following list. X's privacy policy lists "people you follow" among what it shares "with other X users", depending on your settings.

X has only ever described the order of its API. The reference for its older API, still on X's developer site in January 2026, said: "At this time, results are ordered with the most recent following first — however, this ordering is subject to unannounced change and eventual consistency issues." In 2021 a Twitter developer advocate said the same of the newer API, "unless you set any additional sorting in your code".

Whether the app shows the list in that order, X has never said. Asked in 2018 why the API's order didn't fully match the followers page on twitter.com, Twitter's developer advocate Andy Piper answered that he didn't know for sure, and guessed it came down to "eventual consistency". In February 2024 an X designer posted a mock-up of a Followers list with a "Sort by" menu offering "Date followed: latest" and "Date followed: earliest"; we found no sign it ever launched.

There's no date to find either. X's API returns the accounts someone follows with no follow date: the only date on each is when that account was created. When someone followed you explains what you can still work out from the order.

It used to be a feature.

Activity also showed follows people would rather nobody saw. In August 2014 the account of Simon Hamilton, Northern Ireland's finance minister, followed a pornographic account, and social media users were alerted by "the 'activity' section of Twitter's mobile phone app". A spokesman for his party said: "It appears that this account was inadvertently followed for a very brief period of time."

By watching the list and its count. Around Donald Trump's visit to India on 24 and 25 February 2020, the White House account, which followed a dozen accounts, followed six more: Narendra Modi, India's president and prime minister's office, India's embassy in the US, and the US embassy and ambassador in India. Archived copies of its profile show its Following count going from 12 to 18 over those days.

Indian media noticed in April, and wrote that it had started following them earlier that month. When it unfollowed all six at the end of April, NDTV counted 13 accounts left, down from 19. A senior administration official explained that during a presidential visit, the account "typically follows for a short time, the host country's officials to retweet their messages in support of the visit". Without a date on the follow, people date it from when they notice it.

A tool can only do the same: read the list again and again, and compare. Through X's API, reading the accounts someone follows costs $0.010 per account, so $10 for a list of 1,000. Social Bearing, a free site whose menu offered any account's Followers and Friends, Twitter's word for the accounts someone follows, shut down on 4 April 2023 when Twitter revoked its free API access. It said Twitter's free and basic plans were far too limiting and, at about $40,000 a month, the enterprise one far too expensive.

UnfollowMonkey only reads the lists of the account you sign in with: there's no field to enter someone else's username.