People who are following you on Instagram can see your followers and following list. If your account is private, then they can only see the count. But, here, they can see the Instagram ids of the people who are following you. With the help of that, they might give requests to the people who ate following you on Instagram, or they might give requests based on your following list. On Instagram, the following are the set of people you follow on Instagram. It might be your friend, some social media celebrity, business brands, clothing brands, and some fitness page. It can be anything that you love to follow on Instagram. To follow these people, you can either do them directly, or you have to first give requests to them on Instagram.
