There are so many Nigerian bots on X. Here is how I removed my Nigerian X followers!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed a significant increase in African and Black profiles appearing in both my X feed and my post engagements. Don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely no issue with race, I’m just pointing out a sudden shift.

As someone who logs onto X every day and spends a good amount of time there, this pattern started caught my attention daily. Curious, I decided to click through a few of these profiles. The most striking thing I found was that every single one of them was from Nigeria. Not a single account from any other country — just Nigeria. At first, I thought, ‘Okay, maybe I followed a few Nigerian creators recently, and the algorithm is just serving me more of that.’ But as the volume increased, and I kept seeing the exact same style of posts over and over, I grew suspicious. I decided to dig into it online, and it turns out, I’m definitely not the only one who has noticed this and complained about it.

First, I came up with this LinkedIn post

It claims that X halted payouts of many Nigerian creators because of spamming, artificial engagement and algorithm manipulation.

[embed]Nigeria Creators Suspended by X Over Spam and Bots | Techpression posted on the topic | LinkedIn X Halts Payouts for 80% of Nigerian Creators, Spam & Bots Allegedly Behind Crackdown Nigeria's creator economy just hit…www.linkedin.com

The first ‘aha’ moment! Then I saw this X post:

The owner of the tweet claims that he is showing an example of an X bot. A profile, pretending to be an American but he is actually posting from Nigeria. Also in this post, it is claimed that Nigeria is a hub for X bots, like Pakistan.

This was yet another piece of information that made me even more suspicious.

Lastly, I read this Reddit entry:

It became clear to me that Nigeria has evolved into a central hub for bot farms, meaning the influx of Nigerian accounts and content on my X feed is a direct result of this operation.

I decided to clean my audience of these Nigerian bots. But how? I have over 2k following and around 1700 followers. Should I check each of them manually?

This solution didn’t seem logical or doable to me.

Then I remember using Circleboom to filter out my inactive followers. I still have an account. Maybe they have a filter option to group my X audience based on their locations.

I checked the filter and bingo!

I found the location filter among many others.

I wrote ‘Nigeria’ and clicked ‘Apply Filters’.

Wow

It showed me that out of my 1715 followers, 176 are Nigerian. I was right about my observation. It is almost 10%!

Everything I read convinced me that it was time for a major account cleanse. I went down the list, selected those profiles, and clicked ‘Remove Follower.’

Just like that, my first move was to completely wipe out my Nigerian follower base.

Circleboom provides a bulk remove followers option. You can find a detailed guide on their page on how to do it!

Okay, Nigerian bot followers are gone. Now, it is time to purge Nigerian followings.

Accounts that I follow!

Again, on Circleboom, I navigated to the All Your Following page.

I applied the same location filter, by writing Nigeria on it.

Wow again!

I have 208 followings from Nigeria. It is again almost 10%.

It is incredible that 10% of my X audience is from Nigeria, and I wasn’t aware of that!

I selected all these accounts and clicked on Unfollow this time. Thanks to Circleboom’s Bulk Unfollow feature, I don’t need to unfollow them one by one.

Gone. I unfollowed all these Nigerian accounts that I follow on X.

This is not a racist thing. I don’t have a problem with Nigerian accounts, but I also don’t have any relationships with them.

Plus, there are many pieces of information that make me suspicious about them, being bots and spam.

I cleaned them, and now I will test if I will see Nigerian accounts and posts on X anymore.