Thread users have been making long jokes about the sometimes weird posts provided by recommended algorithms since the beginning of the app. However, recently some users have begun to notice that other types of strange posts appearing in suggestions. This is a post from random people looking for “friends.”
Posts often feature selfies of young people who claim to have a profile of 18. Engadget observed that a number of such posts that appear in the thread’s “related threads” feature suggests content to logout users. It is not clear why these posts appear as “related” in other popular recommended posts.
for example, For Spotify from a popular thread, user Chris Messina was suggested in the thread’s home feed and logged out the user. Clicking on a post has resulted in a “related” post from Threads Head Adam Mosseri. But below that post was another “related” post from an account claiming to be an 11th grade 18-year-old girl.
For some reason, threads appear to have surfaced many other such posts in the “related threads” feature. For example, the following post was recommended as a “related” post elsewhere in the app: Looking at this user’s profile, it shows that they have posted the same thing (photos followed by a WhatsApp link) more than 30 times in the last five days.
And this is what Engadget editor-in-chief Aaron Souppouris recently logged out as a “related” thread under one of my own posts.
With threads growing to over 350 million users, it’s no surprise that the platform will see an influx of spam. Meta Exec Mosseri said the company saw it increase It was soon after the service was launched in July 2023 due to a “spam attack.” Last year, the company said it was working to control engagement baits.
But the mere presence of spam on the platform is not just the size of the thread, but it’s odd that apps frequently recommend these posts. Meta did not respond to specific questions about these posts or why they are featured as “related” content, but confirmed that the app should not feature spam posts as recommended content.
In particular, Spammy’s post appears to be appearing as a recommendation in other parts of the Meta app as well. One Reddit user recently noticed a strange post that appears as a recommendation on Instagram. This post featured a selfie of a woman with the phrase “I’m bf🎀age not now inding.” A quick look at the user’s profile shows that he posted dozens of times last week with the same caption. “Literally, every time the proposed thread window appears, you need to scroll through 2-4 posts like this before you see the normal one,” Redditor said. . “I press ‘No Interested’ and report everyone I see, but they still show up. ”
This post appears to be related to some kind of ongoing spam campaign. The exact same selfies and text flagged by Redditor were shared with at least one other thread account. Also, searching in threads shows that many other accounts share posts that say “age doesn’t matter” or “I don’t care about age” almost constantly.
Have you seen posts like this in thread recommendations? Please contact Karissa.bell [at] On the signal on engadget.com or karissabe.51.
