134 New followers in 5 minutes?

I don't post on tiktok. My account is private with one singular friend.

My saves weren't showing up so I tried logging in through the website where I could only view my profile.

I went and unprivated my account for less than 5 minutes to see if that would do anything and I suddenly had 134 followers. How does that happen? Most are obviously bots but some seem genuine.

My saves popped up later but now I have to unfollow all these people. I'm mostly just confused.