Malicious bots and spammers follow everyone, including you. The spam following could hurt your credibility or expose your Twitter account to phishing. So, let’s take a deep dive into random followers on Twitter and how to purge strangers from your Twitter account.
What Are Followers on Twitter?
Anyone who shows up on your Followers’ lists or receives your tweets on their timeline is your follower. It means the follower liked your content. Therefore, they decided to subscribe to your content. Once a Twitter user hits the follow button, they become your follower.
Why Do I Get Random Followers on Twitter?
Your Account Is Public
Is your Twitter account public? A new Twitter account starts its Twitter journey as a public account. If you’re yet to change the settings to private, your account is public. Anyone with a Twitter account can view, react, and respond to your tweets. It also means they can follow you by simply hitting the follow button. What’s more, a public account has no mechanisms or options to approve or deny followers. So if you don’t see any follow requests or keep getting random followers, you may need to change your account to protect your tweets. A private Twitter account will give you the privilege to accept or deny followers.
How To Protect Your Tweets Via App
How To Protect Your Tweets Via Browser
You’ll still be searchable. But remember, your followers can still capture and share your tweets. Fortunately, you’ll have the power to approve or reject a potential follower.
Strangers Hoping To Get More Followers
The random followers could be Twitter users following random people to get more followers. If you’ve been on Twitter for quite some time, you might have come across the “follow for a follow” hashtags or threads. It’s somewhat popular, and it works. Initially, people assumed that it was rude not to follow someone who follows you. People took advantage of this and started following random Twitter users hoping to increase their followers and gain more visibility. If your random followers followed you hoping to get a following, there is a high chance they’ll unfollow you once you follow them back. Protect your tweets to prevent random followers.
Twitter Bots
The random followers could be bots. Bots are automated accounts created and managed by bot software. Twitter bots behave like normal Twitter users. It can like tweets, tweet, retweet, DM, unfollow, or follow Twitter users. Twitter bots can be malicious or helpful. An example of a helpful Twitter bot is a customer bot. Companies use such bots to improve their customer support response time. While they can be helpful, some Twitter bots can be harmful. Cybercriminals use bots to spread malware. They do this by sending malicious bots to follow Twitter users. They can also pass on links that contain malware to Twitter users. These links come as short links to trick unsuspecting Twitter users. The bots probably followed you because of the keywords you used in your tweets. Look out for these to delineate Twitter bots from real Twitter users.
Strange and spammy usernames. User names often contain numbers. Profiles appear anonymous. You won’t see any bio information. Bot accounts release lots of similar tweets almost at the same time. The account’s tweets and replies are short. In most cases, a Twitter bot tweets the same content. The followers-following ratio is lopsided. Twitter bots often follow lots of accounts but have a handful of followers. Check the account’s creation date. Bots often have recent creation dates.
Protecting your tweets is the most effortless approach to prevent bots or spammy accounts from following you. Alternatively, you can block or report any spammy follower or bot.
Block the Account
Follow the following steps to block:
Report the Account
We occasionally get random followers on Twitter because of our tweets. Most of these random followers don’t pose any threat to our accounts as long as we ignore them. You’ll expose your account to malicious users if you always follow anyone who follows you. Thus block or report such users. We have the responsibility to keep Twitter safe.
- Log in to your account.
- Tap your profile icon in the top left corner.
- Select “Settings & privacy.”
- Tap “Privacy & safety.”
- Click on “Audience and tagging” and switch on “Protect your Tweets.”
