Why am I following people without meaning to?

Hi Simon. Hope you'll bear with my questions...

1. Do you by any chance have a private account and you need to grant people permission to follow you?

If yes, the act of letting people follow your private account actually causes you to follow them back. It's an unfortunate side-effect of the way Twitter's private accounts are currently designed.

Twitter has already said that they intend to change this behavior, but there's no definite timeline yet as to when these changes will be implemented, since they are first focused on stabilizing the system.

2. If, on the other hand, you actually have a public account, then my question is this: Have you by any chance recently enabled auto-follow for your account? There are third-party services (such as Tweetlater and Socialtoo) that let you automatically follow back anyone who follows you.

If you think there's a chance that a third-party service is automatically following back those individuals on your behalf, but you can't remember which third-party service it is, then your best bet is to change your Twitter password.

If you can't recall using any third party service that may have automatically followed back those individuals on your behalf, then I believe your best recourse is to log a support ticket at http://twitter.com/help, describe the problem that you have (as you did above), and make sure to include the two accounts that you're now mysteriously following.

Hope that helps in some way.