How to See Who You Follow on Facebook
It is on your profile, filed under feed housekeeping rather than put on display, and it quietly contains every friend you have.
Yes, you can see who you follow on Facebook, though not from one tidy tab. Open your profile and look for Following, under Friends on desktop and in your About information on mobile, and you get the people and Pages you follow, mixed together.
That list is longer than most people expect, because Facebook follows every friend for you automatically when the friendship is made. So what you are looking at is your friends, plus anyone you follow one way, plus every Page you ever followed.
And there is no number. A profile displays a follower count with no matching following count beside it, so the only way to know how many accounts you follow is to scroll the list or export it.
The reason this is awkward is that following was retrofitted onto a friendship network, and it never became part of how a Facebook profile presents itself.
On Instagram and X, following is a display. It sits next to your follower count, strangers read both, and the ratio between them is treated as a statement about the account. People curate it because other people look.
On Facebook it is plumbing. Following decides whose posts are allowed to reach your feed, nothing more, which is why the controls for it live near your feed settings instead of on your profile, why the list is governed by a privacy setting, and why Facebook never bothered to give it a headline number.
That difference explains almost every frustration with the question. You are looking for an Instagram-shaped screen on a network that files the same information as a maintenance tool.
Where is the Following list on Facebook?
Your profile keeps it, and Facebook moves it between app versions. On desktop, open your profile, go to the Friends section, and choose Following. On mobile, open your profile and look for Following in your About information.
What you get is a single list mixing people and Pages. Where the app offers a filter, you can split them; where it does not, you scroll one list and sort it out yourself.
Two things it is not. It is not your friend list, even though most of the names in it are friends. And it is not your followers list, which points the other way: followers are accounts receiving your posts, and following is accounts whose posts reach you.
If the entry is not where you expect, the feed settings route below carries the same list and moves around less.
Why does the list include all of your friends?
Because accepting a friend request turns on following in both directions. Nobody chooses it, and Facebook does not announce it, but from that moment each of you follows the other.
So your following list starts at your friend count and grows from there. Add one-way follows of people who are not friends, add every Page you tapped Follow on over the years, and the total is usually in the hundreds before you have made a single deliberate decision about it.
The two relationships can be separated, which is the part worth knowing. You can unfollow a friend and stay friends: they leave your following list, their posts stop arriving, and the friendship is untouched.
Which means the list is not a record of who you like. It is a record of whose posts you currently allow through, which is why it rarely looks anything like your taste.
Where the Following list lives on phone and desktop
The profile list leaves something out. Groups you have joined also send posts to your feed, and they do not appear under Following on your profile at all.
The surface that collects everything is your feed settings, reached through Settings and Privacy and then Settings, in the section about your feed. Facebook has renamed it several times, so look for the area about managing what you see rather than an exact menu label. It lists people, Pages and groups together, and lets you unfollow, snooze, or mark Favorites from the same screen.
If you want a complete copy you can actually count, the route is your account information rather than the app interface. In Accounts Center, under your information and permissions, the option to access your information has a Connections section covering followers and following. That returns the full list as data, the only version that yields an actual count.
Use the export when the question is how many, and the in-app list when the question is who.
Who else can open your Following list
That depends on a privacy setting. Facebook has a setting that controls who can see the people and Pages you follow, so what a visitor gets depends on how yours is set. Check it rather than assuming either way.
One exception is structural: a Page always knows its own followers, because that is how an admin sees an audience at all. Your privacy setting controls who can browse your list, not whether the accounts you follow can tell that you follow them.
There is also no public directory of one-way follows on Facebook the way there is for a following tab elsewhere. Someone wanting to know who you follow has to be allowed to see your list.
Which makes third-party tools claiming to reveal anyone's following list worth ignoring. They cannot exceed what the privacy setting already exposes, and a site asking you to connect your own account before revealing somebody else's connections is asking for the thing it pretends to give you.
How do you unfollow without unfriending?
From the list itself, or from the menu on any post in your feed. The option is unfollow, and it is silent. The person is not notified, nothing appears anywhere, and the friendship stays exactly as it was.
Keep the two directions straight, because Facebook has a control for each. Unfollowing is outbound: you stop seeing them. Removing a follower is inbound: they stop seeing you. They are different buttons with different consequences, and people reach for the wrong one regularly.
There are softer options in the same place. Snoozing hides an account temporarily instead of permanently, and Favorites pins a chosen set of people and Pages to a separate feed so their posts are easy to find.
None of it is permanent, and refollowing is a tap.
What does a visitor to your profile actually read?
Not this list. Unless they have been allowed to see it and go looking, the accounts you follow are invisible to someone landing on your profile.
What they read is the follower count, because that is the figure Facebook puts on display. It is the one number about your audience that a stranger registers in the two seconds before deciding whether to scroll on, and it does that job whether or not you think about it.
Be precise about what it does, though. It changes how a visitor reads the profile. It is a display figure, not a lever on what Facebook shows to anyone, and treating a counter as distribution is how people end up disappointed by a number that went up.
So the two lists have opposite jobs. Following is private housekeeping that decides what you see. Followers is the public figure that decides what a stranger thinks. Only one of them is being read by anybody else.
Questions people ask about following on Facebook
How do I see who I follow on Facebook?
Open your profile and find Following: under the Friends section on desktop, or in your About information on mobile. The list mixes people and Pages, and you can filter it where your app version offers the option.
How to see who you are following on Facebook on a phone?
Open your own profile in the app and look for Following inside your About information. If it is missing in your version, the feed settings under Settings and Privacy carry the same list, plus your groups.
Does Facebook show a following count?
No. A profile displays a follower count and no matching following number, so there is nothing to read at a glance. Exporting your connections through your account information is the only way to get an actual count.
Are my friends counted as people I follow?
Yes. Becoming friends turns on following in both directions automatically, so every friend is in your following list unless you unfollowed them. That is why the list is much longer than the accounts you deliberately chose.
Can people see who I follow on Facebook?
Only if your privacy setting allows it. Facebook controls this with a setting rather than showing the list the way a following tab works elsewhere, so open the setting and check yours. The Pages and accounts you follow can always tell that you follow them.
How do I unfollow someone on Facebook without unfriending them?
Use unfollow, from your following list or from the menu on one of their posts. The friendship stays intact, their posts stop reaching your feed, and they are never notified.
Keep reading
- add followers to a public profile — The list of accounts you follow is private housekeeping, while the follower count is the figure a visitor actually reads, and you can add followers to a public profile to change what it says.
- the list pointing the other way — Following and followers are separate lists on Facebook, and the list pointing the other way explains why the follower number never matches either of them.
- removing a follower without blocking them — Unfollowing controls what reaches you, while removing a follower without blocking them is the inbound version of the same idea.
- why a Page shows two different numbers — Following a Page is not the same as liking it, and why a Page shows two different numbers covers what each one still means.