How to find the inactive accounts you follow on X
Dead accounts quietly fill your timeline and skew your ratio. Here is how to find them and decide which ones to drop.
Open your Following list and ask how many of those accounts posted this month. On a list that has grown for a few years, the answer is usually under half.
Those are the easiest accounts to clear. Nobody is offended, nothing is lost, and on most lists they are the largest single group. The problem is finding them.
Why X will not show you
The Following list gives you a name, a handle and a bio, ordered newest first. No last post date, no sort, no filter, and no search within your own list. The only built-in way to check whether an account is alive is to open its profile, one at a time. At two thousand following that is a day of work.
By hand, for a small list
X's search will tell you about one account at a time:
- Search
from:handleto see everything an account has posted. - Add a date:
from:handle since:2026-01-01. No results means nothing this year. - Repeat for every account you follow.
With the extension
It reads your following list from the X tab you are already signed into and fetches the last post date for each account. The Inactive filter then gives you thresholds at 7, 14, 25, 30, 60 and 90 days.
Which threshold to use:
- 90+ days. Effectively abandoned. Clear without looking.
- 60+ days. Mostly dormant, with the occasional person who took a summer off. Worth a scroll first.
- 30+ days. Too blunt alone. Plenty of good accounts post monthly. Pair it with another filter.
Sort by Inactive first to put the deadest accounts at the top and work down until you start recognising names.
The combinations that work
- Inactive 90+ and under 100 followers. Abandoned small accounts, mostly follow-back leftovers. Highest volume, lowest regret.
- Inactive 60+ with Protect mutuals on. Clears the dormant while leaving everyone who follows you back alone.
- Inactive 60+ and not verified. A rough proxy for accounts with nothing invested in the platform.
Two kinds of account to keep
The ones who post rarely but well: one long thread a quarter that you actually read. And the ones you follow for reference rather than for a timeline, like a project account that posts twice a year and is doing its job.
Both look identical to a filter. Protecting them takes a minute and saves the only part of a cleanup anyone regrets.
Some accounts will say Unknown
X leaves the last post out of its list responses for protected accounts, for accounts that have never posted, and sometimes for no stated reason. Those show as Unknown, sort to the bottom, and are excluded from the Inactive filter rather than guessed at.
Once you have a set, pace it. The daily limits apply to dead accounts exactly as they do to live ones, because X cannot tell the difference at the moment you click.