Why do threads recommend these weird spam posts from people looking for “friends”?
Thread users have long joked about the singular posts that their suggestion algorithms have provided since the early days of the application. But recently, some users have started to notice another type of weird posts appearing in their suggestion: posts from random people looking for “friends”.
These posts often feature selfies of young people whose profile claims to be 18 years old. Engadget observed that many of these posts appear in the “relevant thread” functions of threads, which surfaces recommend content to logged in users. It is not clear why these posts are “related” to other popular recommended posts.
For example, Chris Messina, a popular thread user about Spotify, made suggestions for logging in users on Threads' Home Feed. Click on the “relevant” post that surfaced Adam Mosseri. However, below the post is another “related” post on the account of an 11-year-old girl who claims to be a 18-year-old.
For whatever reason, threads appear to surface in their “relevant threads” functionality. For example, it is also recommended to use the following post as a “relevant” post elsewhere in the app. Viewing this user's profile shows that they posted the same thing – the photo was followed by WhatsApp link – more than 30 times in the last five days.
This is the “relevant” thread below the “relevant” thread, Engadget's editor-in-chief Aaron Souppouris, was recently recommended as one of my own posts.
As threads have grown to over 350 million users, it is no surprise that the platform will see the influx of spam. Meta Exec Mosseri said the company saw an increase in “spam attacks” in July 2023 (short after the service was launched). Last year, the company said it was working to control engagement bait.
But while the thread size of spam only exists on the platform isn't unexpected, it's strange that the app recommends these posts so often. Meta did not answer specific questions about these posts, or why they are called “related” content, but confirmed that spam should not be listed in the recommended content in the app.
It is worth noting that spam posts appear to be in other parts of the Meta app as well. A Reddit user recently noticed a weird post that appeared on Instagram. This post features a selfie of a woman with the words “I need a bf🎀 era doesn’t mind”. A quick look at the user's profile shows that they posted dozens of times last week with the same subtitles. “Literally, whenever the suggested thread window appears, I have to scroll through 2-4 posts like this before I can see something normal,” Redditor. “I press 'Not Interested' and report every one I see, but they still keep showing up.”
The post seems to be related to some kind of ongoing spam campaign. The exact same selfies and text tagged by Redditor are shared by at least one other thread account. Searches on the thread show that many other accounts share posts almost constantly saying “age doesn’t matter” or “don’t mind age.”
Have you seen such a post in your suggestions on threads? Get in touch on karissa.bell [at] Signals from Engadget.com or Karissabe. 51.
