No. The problem is that Medium seems to randomly auto-follow people on behalf of users. Since I follow nobody, I am able to spot this and unfollow people every time it happens. Most people are probably not aware of this strange functionality. I think I read about someone else being aware of this at some point.

I wonder if this functionality was intentionally added by Medium — to bootstrap the social network — or whether it is a bug that they don’t know about. Even though I have know about this bug for months, I have not yet filed a bug report about it.

UPDATE: I just filed a bug report with Medium about this.