Seeing a large number of suspicious followers recently – could these be bot accounts?

[rewyekha]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Account Related

Body

Hi everyone,
Over the past several days, I've noticed a consistent increase in new followers on my GitHub account. Many of these accounts appear suspicious because they have very similar profile structures, generic AI/technology-related bios, and profile pictures that don't seem related to their activity.
A typical pattern is:

Several new accounts follow my profile each day (sometimes 10 or more).
Some of those accounts unfollow after a short period.
New accounts then appear and repeat the same behavior.

I'm concerned that this may be automated bot activity or follower spam rather than genuine users.
Has anyone else experienced this recently?
Also, can GitHub confirm whether receiving these unsolicited followers could negatively affect my account in any way? I want to ensure my account remains in good standing, as I am not interacting with or encouraging these accounts.

Thanks for any clarification.

[rufatj]

Hey, don't worry about it at all. Your account is completely safe and GitHub definitely won't ban you for this. These algorithms know the difference between a real user and a bot network. You only get penalized if you're the one buying fake followers or running scripts to manipulate stats, but since you're just a passive target, you have nothing to worry about.

This is a pretty common spam tactic where bots mass-follow active accounts hoping people will follow back or click the shady links in their bios, and then they unfollow after a while to keep their own follower ratio clean. GitHub runs routine cleanups and usually purges these accounts in waves anyway.

You can just block or report the most annoying ones if you want, but honestly, you can just ignore them. Your account is in perfectly good standing so you can just keep focusing on your work.

[rewyekha]

I thought the same! but recently one of my friend lost his account. so i wanted to check it with others too.

btw, thanks for the response mate!