A viral post on Facebook is leaving a number of people panicking about being stalked - but it is in fact a hoax.

The post suggests there are covert "followers" on the social media site - in other words they are secretly stalking you.

It encourages people to go to the 'block' section of settings and type in 'following me'.

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A list of names then appear, which the post says are people stalking your profile.

However, this has been outed as nothing more than scare-mongering as there is no truth in the post.

When you type something into the search bar on Facebook, it is going to find ANY and ALL pages, people, and/or posts with those words in them.

Tech experts at ThatsNonsense.com said: "Why Facebook would implement a feature that would allow users to see their paid stalkers or 'covert followers' seems oddly counter-productive, yet this logical flaw hasn’t seemed to stop these rumours from going viral, regularly."