What are mutuals on X (Twitter), and how do you see yours?

A mutual is someone you follow who follows you back. Merriam-Webster lists the informal noun as "a reciprocal or mutual follower on social media" and dates that sense to 2008. Cambridge defines it as "a person on social media who follows you (= chooses to see what you post), and who you follow". Cambridge gives another sense too, a friend two people share, so "mutuals" can also mean mutual friends. Collins has no entry for it.

"Moots" means the same thing. Merriam-Webster says it comes "by shortening & alteration from mutual", and dates it to 2017. It isn't the older word "moot", which goes back to an Old English word for an assembly.

The phrase "mutual follower" is older than the noun. On 12 June 2007, @TishShute wrote that she "tried to tidy up Twitter and leave anyone who wasn't a mutual follower". That's the earliest use Dictionary.com points to, not proof that it was the first.

Open its profile on X while you're signed in. If it follows you, X shows a "Follows you" label next to its @handle, and if you don't follow it yet, the button reads "Follow back". Both are in X's web app code as of October 2026; we haven't checked the phone apps. If you follow the account and the label is there, it's a mutual.

Profiles also tell you about the people you follow. A profile can say it's "Followed by" a few of them "and N others you follow", or "Not followed by anyone you're following". That's about your network, not about whether the account follows you.

No. X's app text has no "mutuals" label, and X's following FAQ is plain about it: "Following on X isn't mutual. Someone who thinks you're interesting can follow you, and you don't have to approve it or follow them back." Your Followers and your Following are two separate lists, with no filter for the accounts on both.

"Followers you know" isn't a list of mutuals either. On someone else's profile, that tab opens a page whose address ends in followers_you_follow. It lists the people you follow who follow that account.

X's API has no mutuals list either. It returns followers and following as separate lists, and its user data can say, for an account, whether it follows you and whether you follow it.

Your mutuals are the accounts on both of your lists. There are three ways to find them:

• By hand. Go down your Following list and open each profile, looking for "Follows you". It's slow, but it involves nobody but you and X.
• From your X archive. It holds your followers and the accounts you follow as two files of account numbers, follower.js and following.js. The numbers in both are your mutuals. Our archive guide compares two files in a spreadsheet to find what's missing. For mutuals, put these two side by side and keep the matches instead.
• With a tracker. On UnfollowMonkey, open your Followers list and set "You follow" to "Yes". The same comparison gives you who doesn't follow you back.

Be careful with apps sold as mutual checkers. X's help on third-party apps says they "are not owned or operated by X", and "You should be cautious before giving any third-party app access to your account." An app with read access to your account can "See who you follow, mute, and block". What to look for: are unfollow trackers safe?

Very little on X needs a follow in both directions. Most rules need a follow one way only:

The quotes come from X's help on Direct Messages, replies and profile visibility. The birth-date option is the only X setting we found that needs both follows.

DMs used to need both in practice. Twitter's help in 2014 said: "You can only send a direct message to a user who is following you; you can only receive direct messages from users you follow." So a conversation needed a follow each way. On 20 April 2015, Twitter wrote that before, you'd "have to ask them to follow you first", and let anyone opt in to messages from anyone.

Fewer than half in these three studies, and the number depends on what is counted:

Two accounts that follow each other are one pair but two follow links, so counting links gives a bigger share. It also depends on whose accounts are counted. Among Korean-speaking users in 2010, about 60% of linked pairs followed each other.

A follow back also depends on who asks. In an experiment published in PNAS in 2021, Twitter users were "nearly three times more likely to follow-back a copartisan account compared to a counterpartisan account". The accounts were bots presented as Democrats or Republicans, and Twitter blocked them from following more people after two days.

Your Followers list on UnfollowMonkey has a "You follow" filter: "Yes" keeps your mutuals, "No" keeps the followers you don't follow back. Your Following list has a "Follows you" filter for the other side, and your list of unfollowers has "You follow them", to see which mutuals left.

We redo the comparison no more often than we check your followers, which is once a month on Free and every day on the paid Kong plan. It can be less often than that, so on Free a new mutual can take weeks to show. On Free we compare up to 4,000 accounts you follow, and on Kong up to 10,000. X doesn't tell anyone when they're unfollowed, mutual or not: does X notify when you unfollow?