I Built a Tool to Find Out Who's Not Following You Back on Instagram (And It Lives in the Browser Console)

📰 Dev.to · Stanley Owen

Learn how to build a browser console tool to identify non-reciprocal Instagram followers and improve your social media management

intermediate Published 15 May 2026

Action Steps

Open the Instagram website in a browser and navigate to your profile page
Open the browser console by pressing F12 or right-clicking on the page and selecting Inspect
Run a JavaScript script in the console to fetch your follower list and the list of users you are following
Compare the two lists to identify users who are not following you back
Use the results to unfollow non-reciprocal followers and optimize your Instagram engagement

Who Needs to Know This

Social media managers and marketers can benefit from this tool to optimize their Instagram follower list and engagement strategy

Key Insight

💡 You can use JavaScript and the browser console to automate tasks and analyze social media data