Can You See When Someone Followed Someone on Instagram?

Your own follows: two places with dates

In the app. Go to your profile, open Following and change the sort order to the date you followed, latest or earliest first (menu names as of October 2026). Latest first shows your most recent follows; earliest first takes you back to the accounts you followed when you joined.

In your data download. In Accounts Center, under Your information and permissions, you can request a download of your information that includes your followers and the accounts you follow. The files list each account with a timestamp. Preparing the download can take a while, and it covers your own account only.

For your new followers, notifications show when someone started following you, with a relative time such as '3d'.

Someone else's follows: no date anywhere

Instagram doesn't tell other people when you follow someone, and it doesn't tell you when someone else did. A profile shows how many accounts it follows, and its Following list shows which ones. Neither carries a date. The only person who is told about a new follow is the one who was followed, through their own notifications.

It used to be different. Until October 2019, the Following activity tab showed what the people you follow liked and whom they followed. Instagram removed it, partly because many users didn't realise their activity was visible to others (Inquirer). Since then there has been no place in the app to see when another account followed someone.

Who did they follow first? The list order won't say

A popular shortcut is to read the top of someone's following list as their latest follow and the bottom as their first. Instagram confirms neither, and users report the order shifting between devices and over time. We go through the evidence in Instagram following list order: what it means. The short version: a position is not a date.

Narrowing it down with a time window

Since no date is published, you can only bracket a follow between two observations. Say you check a public profile's following list at 9:00 and again at 10:00, and an account appears that wasn't there at 9:00. The follow happened between 9:00 and 10:00. If you check once a day, your window is a day wide.

SpySecret runs these checks for you. Each scan saves the list and compares it with the previous state, and the scan rhythm sets the width of the window:

• Basic (€0.99 per week): one scan per profile per day, so a new follow is placed within roughly a day.
• Pro (€8.99 per week): your main Spy profile is scanned about every hour, which narrows the window to roughly an hour. Your other Pro profiles are scanned once a day.
• Manual scans on Pro let you check a profile between the regular scans and split a window further.

How to read the time SpySecret shows

SpySecret shows a time for every detected follow. Read it as a marker for the window in which the follow was found, not as 'followed at this minute'. The follow took place at some point between the previous scan and the scan or check that found it. That sounds less impressive than a timestamp to the second, but it is the honest version: anything more specific would be a guess presented as a fact.

What a time window can't tell you

Windows only exist from the moment you start comparing. A few things stay out of reach:

• Anything before your first scan. Follows that already existed then are your starting point, without dates.
• Follows undone before the next scan. If someone follows and unfollows within the same window, neither shows up.
• Private profiles. Their lists are hidden, so there is nothing to compare.
• Every follow on long lists. A regular scan reads the first page of the list, in the order Instagram returns it. When a profile follows more accounts than fit on that page, a new follow further down can appear late or be missed, and an earlier follow can show up as new.

Be skeptical of old follow dates

If a service offers to show when someone followed an account years ago, ask where that date would come from: Instagram doesn't show it for other users anywhere in the app. A tracker can only know when it first saw a follow, which means its dates begin with its own first look at the profile.