How to find and remove bot followers

Why

Bot and abandoned accounts make your follower count look bigger, but they never like, comment, or buy anything. They also pull down your engagement rate, which is one of the first things brands and potential collaborators check. Removing them by hand means opening every profile and tapping through menus, which is slow enough that most people never get around to it.

Growbot's Community Monitoring checks your followers for signals that often point to a bot, lists the ones that score highly, and lets you move them into the Accounts Queue so you can review them and remove them at a normal pace.

How to use it

Step 1: turn on bot checks

1. Open Settings → Community Monitoring.
2. Make sure Track followers & unfollowers and Automatically check my followers for bots are both checked.
3. Leave Minimum bot score for auto-actions at 70, and leave every auto-action unchecked for now. You want to review the list yourself first.
4. Leave Show alert when bots are detected checked.
5. Click Rescan now to start a full check, or wait for the next scheduled scan. Keep an Instagram tab open while it runs.

Step 2: understand the score

Each follower gets a score from 0 to 100 built from signals that are common on bot and throwaway accounts:

• no profile picture
• no display name, or a display name or username full of digits
• a display name that just repeats the username
• joined Instagram recently
• an empty bio
• no posts
• following hundreds or thousands of accounts while having very few followers

One signal alone means little, since plenty of real people have no bio. A score of 70 or more usually means several signals at once.

Step 3: review the flagged accounts

1. When the scan finishes, the Low-quality followers detected popup lists everyone at or above your minimum score. Click Add all to queue.
2. In the Accounts Queue, look through the list. Take out anyone you recognize or who looks real: select them and use Select... → Remove selected. To make sure Growbot never removes someone, use Add selected to whitelist instead, because remove and block actions skip whitelisted accounts.
3. If the list catches too many real people, raise the minimum score to 80 or 85 and scan again.

Step 4: remove them at a steady pace

1. Open the Process Queue menu, choose Remove Follower, and click Process Queue.
2. Choose Schedule Actions with a modest Actions per day, similar to what you use for follows. Removing followers is still activity on your account.
3. Confirm, then keep an eye on the Log and the Actions Queue as the removals run.

Step 5: automate once you trust it

After a couple of scans where the list looked right, you can check Automatically remove follower under When bots are detected, so new bot followers are handled as they show up.

Tips

• Remove Follower quietly takes the account off your follower list, and it could follow you again later. Block prevents that, so keep it for persistent spam rather than every low-quality account.
• Your follower count will go down. That is the point: the followers you keep are the ones who might actually engage with your posts.
• Large accounts can raise Max accounts per full rescan to check more followers in one pass. Bigger scans take longer and make more requests, so increase it gradually.
• Export the queue to CSV before a large removal if you want a record of who was removed.