How to See Who You Recently Unfollowed on Instagram (2026)

Why there is no list in the app

Instagram shows you plenty about your following list: who you follow, roughly when, and a sort by date. What it never shows is the reverse history, the accounts you removed. Unfollowing is treated as a quiet action with no trail, which is why nobody is notified when you unfollow them. The flip side is that you are not told either. If you unfollowed someone by accident while scrolling, or did a big cleanup and now want to check what you cut, the app cannot help.

The record still exists on Instagram's side, though, because privacy law requires Meta to give you a copy of the data it holds about your account. That copy is the data export, and the unfollow history is one of the smaller files inside it.

Step 1: request the export

1. In the Instagram app, open your profile, tap the menu (☰) and go to Settings and privacy → Accounts Centre → Your information and permissions → Export your information.
2. Choose Create export, pick your Instagram profile, and select Export to device.
3. Under the types of information, tick only Followers and following. Set the format to JSON and the date range to All time.
4. Submit and wait for the email. A followers-only export is small and normally arrives within the hour.

The full click-by-click walkthrough, including the desktop route, is in how to download your Instagram data export.

Step 2: find and open the file

Download the ZIP and unzip it on your phone or computer. Inside, open connections → followers_and_following. Alongside the familiar followers_1.json and following.json you will see recently_unfollowed_profiles.json. Open it in any text editor; it is plain text.

The structure is a single top-level key, relationships_unfollowed_users, holding a list. Each item in the list has an empty title and a string_list_data array with one object inside: href (the profile URL), value (the username) and timestamp (when you unfollowed, as a Unix number). The list is in date order, most recent last, so the bottom of the file is your latest unfollow.

To turn a timestamp into a date, paste it into a Unix time converter, or in a spreadsheet use =A1/86400+DATE(1970,1,1) and format the cell as a date. If you chose HTML rather than JSON, the same file is recently_unfollowed_profiles.html and the dates are already written out in words.

If the file is missing from your ZIP, the usual reason is that you have not unfollowed anyone in the last year, in which case Instagram omits it rather than writing an empty one. The other common cause is a date range other than All time; a “last year” export can still include the file, but a shorter range may not. Re-request with All time selected and it should appear. Each entry is one account, so a quick way to count your unfollows for the year is to search the file for "value" and read the number of matches. The rest of the folder is mapped in what's inside your Instagram data export.

What the file does not show

• Anything older than about a year.The history is rolling. An export taken today will not include an unfollow from eighteen months ago, and no later export recovers it. If you want a permanent log, keep each export's copy of the file.
• Accounts that unfollowed you.This is the question most people actually have, and the file is silent on it. Instagram records your actions, not other people's. To see who left, you need two exports from different dates and a comparison of the followers lists, which the who unfollowed me on Instagram tool does in your browser.
• Why you unfollowed. There is no note, no category, and no indication of whether the account followed you at the time.
• Blocks and removals. Blocking someone, or removing a follower, is logged elsewhere in the export (under blocked profiles and removed suggestions), not in this file.

Reading it alongside your other dates

The unfollow file is most useful next to following.json, which records the date you followed each account you still follow. Together they let you reconstruct the story of a relationship: followed in March, unfollowed in September. The method for the follow dates is in how to see when you followed someone on Instagram. If you are partway through a large cleanup, the file also tells you exactly where you got to; the pacing for that kind of job is in how to mass unfollow on Instagram safely.

One honest note: the Instagram data export analyzer reads your followers and following files and converts every timestamp for you, but it does not currently display the recently-unfollowed file. For that one, a text editor and the spreadsheet formula above are the whole toolkit, and they take about two minutes.