The X account making NHL players rethink social media: ‘It’s pretty invasive’

Olen Zellweger was up early.

The 22-year-old Anaheim Ducks defenseman had woken just before 5 a.m. PT on Feb. 22 to join the rest of the hockey world in watching the men’s Olympic gold medal game.

A few hours later, the “passionate” Canadian watched as American Jack Hughes scored in overtime to give the United States its first men’s hockey gold in 46 years.

“I was pissed that Canada lost,” Zellweger said. “Especially against the U.S.”

Later that day, Zellweger joined teammates for a Ducks-organized event at Disneyland. A day of rides and a parade couldn’t get his mind off the bitter loss. In moments of downtime, he scrolled through videos of Team USA celebrating. In the middle of the theme park, Zellweger let out his frustration — on Instagram.

One by one, he unfollowed four of the most prominent American players: Jack Hughes, Auston Matthews, Jack Eichel and Clayton Keller. Harmless, he thought.

“A little housekeeping,” Zellweger said. “It’s not like I don’t like those guys. I started following them when I was a kid. Like, 12.”

When he arrived at Ducks practice the next day, Zellweger heard three words that would make many young players quiver.

“You’ve gone viral,” a team media relations representative told him.

Zellweger, an affable player still on his entry-level contract, said he didn’t intend for anyone to notice his social media moves.

It turns out, he didn’t have a choice.

Three months earlier, an X account launched with little fanfare. Named NHL Follow Tracker (@NHLFollowTrack), the account began posting multiple updates every hour on who NHL players and teams followed and unfollowed on Instagram, one of the world’s most popular social media platforms.

At 2:48 a.m. ET on Feb. 23, NHL Follow Tracker posted an update about Zellweger’s Instagram account: large red X emojis beside the names of the players he had unfollowed.

👉 olenzellweger (Olen Zellweger) started following 0 and unfollowed 6:

❌ _ellerylopez (elle)
🔗 https://t.co/qBEDkpFMBd
❌ austonmatthews (AM)
🔗 https://t.co/hpdh4nwQ3I
❌ claytonkeller19 (Clayton Keller)
🔗 https://t.co/BKivOC7LND
❌ jackeichel (Jack Eichel)
🔗… pic.twitter.com/FvAqh2Lyfh

— NHL Follow Tracker (@NHLFollowTrack) February 23, 2026

As Team USA’s celebrations turned political and sparked controversy, the post took off. It has since garnered well over 1,000 re-posts and dozens of replies.

“Oh he was CHEESED lmao what a patriot,” one user wrote.

“Olen Zellweger woke? This is a joke,” said another.

“I was shocked that it went viral,” Zellweger said. “Those guys don’t know me.”

That did not matter to the online world.

Zellweger, depending on how you see it, was one of the first casualties or beneficiaries of an X account that has offered a revealing look at NHL player interests, including potential romantic connections and political leanings.

The account is growing — closing in on 17,300 followers. And its ability to gain significant attention in certain moments has been noticed.

“The whole league knows about it,” said Toronto Maple Leafs defenseman Troy Stecher, shaking his head. “It’s pretty invasive.”

Fuat Aras had never watched a full NHL game when he first landed on Vancouver Island last year. He’d never even been to Canada before when he traveled from his native Istanbul, Turkey, to study for his MBA at Vancouver Island University.

After a few days in his new home, the inquisitive student learned Canadians followed hockey with the same fervency with which he supported his favorite Istanbul-based soccer team, Fenerbahce.

“I thought I needed to learn about hockey to integrate into Canadian culture,” Aras said.

Aras liked what he saw. The pace, the physicality. It was unlike anything he’d ever seen.

He quickly became “addicted” to hockey after watching his first few Vancouver Canucks games, regardless of their place at the bottom of the NHL’s standings. And the game itself only whetted his appetite for more information.

Aras comes from a place where sports media can be more aggressive than in Canada. Any crumb of information about players is quickly baked into full-blown stories, for better or worse. If a player leaves a comment on another player’s Instagram account, it will likely become a story in Europe.

Aras was simultaneously working on a different coding project that involved scraping real-time data from Instagram.

“Information is money these days, as you know,” Aras said.

In the middle of watching a game, he had the idea: What if I created a bot to track the Instagram activity of NHL players?

“But I wasn’t sure it was interesting, or that it would catch interesting things,” he said.

As Zellweger can attest, Aras was wrong.

He started by scouring NHL rosters online and manually searching for over 700 NHL player and team accounts.

“And that was very hard,” Aras said. “I put the information into my bot and that bot scans every player’s account.”

The Instagram accounts players and teams follow and unfollow is then fed, via Aras’s program, into the X feed. Each player or team who makes an addition or subtraction receives an X post, sometimes highlighting multiple follows and unfollows.

“I have checked and there isn’t anything like this for the NFL or soccer,” he said. “Maybe I will start something similar for the NFL?”

Aras warns before he speaks that English is not his native language and that he might make grammatical errors.

There is still an almost naïve charm to how Aras speaks about hockey, his new obsession. He accidentally calls the Toronto Maple Leafs the “Toronto Maples.” He mispronounces the names of prominent NHL players he now tracks daily. Having only begun watching the NHL over the last year, Aras is still unaware of which players are bona fide celebrities and which are not.

He did not know why his post about Zellweger went viral. Nor did he know that Johnny Gaudreau, one of the players his account tracked and posted about, tragically died before last season. Aras stopped tracking Gaudreau’s Instagram account in March.

Aras said he averages about three hours a day working on his account. As of March, he said the account gains anywhere between 50 and a few hundred new followers a day. He believes his posts are viewed over one million times a day.

Aras shared insights about his account via screenshots reviewed by The Athletic: the majority of fans (52 percent) who view the account are female. The most prominent age group of viewers is 18- to 24-year-olds.

“At first, it was just a hobby,” Aras said. “But then I saw that people loved it, probably because of the gossip that comes from it.”

NHL teams were some of the first to take note.

The Boston Bruins purposely unfollowed every other NHL team’s Instagram account, which NHL Follow Tracker revealed. The Winnipeg Jets began following multiple Jets-themed accounts. When NHL Follow Tracker revealed the Edmonton Oilers began following new acquisition Connor Murphy, the Oilers X account acknowledged it with an emoji.

“The evolution was: How can we have fun with this? Fans are smart enough to know that we were doing things to interact with them indirectly,” said one administrator of a prominent NHL team’s social media account, who was not authorized to speak publicly.

It’s not all fun, though. Perceived controversy moves the needle, too.

After Jeff Skinner was placed on waivers by the San Jose Sharks for the purpose of contract termination in March, both the player and the team unfollowed each other. Those respective posts combined for nearly 4,000 likes.

👉 jeffskinner (Jeff Skinner) started following 0 and unfollowed 1:

❌ sanjosesharks (San Jose Sharks)
🔗 https://t.co/Vrt3skSCPa#NHL #TheFutureIsTeal pic.twitter.com/oNz15ZPLDM

— NHL Follow Tracker (@NHLFollowTrack) March 5, 2026

Teams know they need to be careful.

An administrator of one NHL team’s social media accounts said they recently noticed the team’s Instagram account was still following a high-profile player who departed the organization. The administrator’s instinct was to unfollow the player. Instead, they hesitated, believing that if they were to unfollow the player now, NHL Follow Tracker would bring heightened attention to a simple action. The team account still follows the former player.

It’s not just roster movement that teams need to worry about. Who exactly their players follow can now bring scrutiny.

Nazem Kadri received attention in early March when NHL Follow Tracker revealed he followed right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson. Less than two weeks later another X post blew up when Kadri followed actress Megan Fox.

Teams say they won’t be telling players who and who not to follow on their personal accounts, but they are thinking about education.

A media relations staff member of an NHL team, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said NHL Follow Tracker would be part of social media training ahead of next season. The staffer suggested their team would warn players not just to be mindful of what they post on their personal social media accounts, but who they follow on those accounts.

For players, NHL Follow Tracker has led to feelings of intrigue, confusion and, largely, unease.

Multiple players who asked not to be named suggested NHL Follow Tracker has become a source of frustration for single NHLers, who use Instagram to meet people for romantic purposes.

And it opens up a forum for discussion of players’ personal lives and relationships.

When Maple Leafs and Team USA captain Auston Matthews followed Vanessa Piunno on March 3, there was confusion on X as Matthews was believed to have been in a relationship with Piunno for months.

“It’s watching all the time,” Zellweger said.

“It’s two-headed. It’s kind of bulls—, like stay out of people’s business,” said Maple Leafs goalie Joseph Woll. “But the other side is, you’re on a public social media site and people subscribe to it.”

While Woll put a diplomatic touch on his thoughts, Stecher was more cutting.

“Get a life,” Stecher said. “It’s just really weird.”

“To have an account just for that is odd,” added Philadelphia Flyers forward Noah Cates.

“It’s crazy that someone is taking the time out of their day to do this,” Buffalo Sabres defenseman Owen Power said. “It’s a little bit of an invasion of privacy. But I’m also not doing anything on there that I have to hide.”

The complaints don’t seem overly concerning to Aras. He said he receives emails expressing frustration and raising privacy issues over his account.

“It’s public information,” he said. “If you don’t want to be seen on social media, you can just close your account. Or can make it private so no one will see you. That’s my answer if someone asks me about privacy.”

Aras said if a player’s Instagram account is private, he will not try to determine who they follow and unfollow.

“If someone wants to keep their information private, I have to respect that,” Aras said.

He also said he’d likely stop following individual players if they reached out directly.

“If a player specifically contacts me about their account and asks me to delete it from the system, probably I will delete it,” he said. “But I didn’t talk with anyone because it’s not a big deal for me.”

Some players find the account intriguing.

Leafs forward Jacob Quillan has always had an interest in business. He believes NHL Follow Tracker has the potential to become monetized, which piqued his imagination when he saw the account.

Zellweger saw the potential, too.

“Let’s say it was an app, and someone wanted to purchase the app and then have access to that data, maybe that’s fine. But now it’s just … out there,” Zellweger said.

Aras is a step ahead.

On March 7, he made his data available via an app for both iOS and Android.

If users are interested in getting real-time updates on the actions of specific players, they would have to pay $4 a month. As of April 7, Aras said the app has been downloaded “around 400” times.

“I wasn’t getting any money from this,” Aras said. “As an MBA student, my class and assignment schedule is busy.”

The X account and app are making players reconsider their online behavior.

Quillan, eager to land a full-time NHL job in Toronto, understands everything he does will be viewed under a microscope. And so NHL Follow Tracker would “for sure” make him stop and consider who he is following and unfollowing.

Some might consider, as Aras suggests, turning their accounts private — a move that could limit their ability to further their own business interests and brands.

“I realize some players have turned their account from public to private after I have started my Twitter account,” Aras said. “It’s not a normal thing, but when they realize someone is tracking their activity they change their account from public to private.”

It has players thinking about the time they spend on social media, too.

“It’s more reason to do less on Instagram and be more private,” Cates said.

Power said he enjoys learning about different approaches to health on Instagram, but also admits the endless scrolling on the app “does me more harm than good.”

“It’s … 75 percent garbage,” Power said.

He’s set a restriction on his phone to limit the amount of time he spends on the app. There are times when he has considered leaving altogether.

And NHL Follow Tracker, he admits, is one of the many elements nudging him in that direction.

“People jump to a lot of conclusions,” he said of how players are perceived through their social media activity.

If anyone knows that, it’s Zellweger.

He received messages after he went viral, questioning whether his decision to unfollow American players was out of a distaste for MAGA politics.

Zellweger shakes his head at how a simple action of unfollowing people he doesn’t know on Instagram led to such a response.

“Everyone knows about this account now. I can understand the perspective of trying to develop something,” Zellweger said of NHL Follow Tracker, before pausing, choosing his next words carefully.

“But it’s still,” he said, “a little excessive.”