Threads users have long joked about the sometimes strange posts that the recommendation algorithm has produced since the app’s early days. Recently, however, some users have begun to notice another type of strange post appearing in their suggestions: posts from random people looking for “friends.”
Often, these are selfies of young people whose profiles indicate that they are over 18 years old. Engadget has noticed that many of these posts appear in “related topics” in Threads, which show recommended content to users who are logged out of their accounts. It’s not clear why these posts appear as “related” to other popular recommended posts.
For example, this post about Spotify by popular Threads user Chris Messina was suggested in the main Threads feed to users who are not logged in. If you click on this post, you will see a “related” post from Threads CEO Adam Mosseri. However, under this post was another “related” post from an account that claimed to be from an 18-year-old girl in the 11th grade.
For some reason, Threads seems to show many other similar posts in its “related posts” feature. For example, the following post was also recommended as “related” in another app. A look at this user’s profile shows that they have posted the same thing – a photo with a link to WhatsApp – more than 30 times in the last five days.
And here’s what Engadget’s editor-in-chief, Aaron Souppouris, recently recommended as a “related topic” under one of my own posts while I was logged in.
As the number of Threads users has grown to over 350 million, it’s no surprise that the platform has seen an influx of spam. Meta CEO Mosseri said the company noticed an increase in “spam attacks” in July 2023, shortly after the service launched. Last year, the company said it was working to get the attraction bait under control.
But while the mere presence of spam on a platform the size of Threads is not unexpected, it is surprising that the app is recommending these posts so frequently. Meta did not answer specific questions about these posts or why they appear as “related” content, but confirmed that spam should not appear as recommended content on the app.
It is noteworthy that spam posts seem to appear as recommendations in other parts of Meta apps as well. One Reddit user recently noticed a strange post that appeared as a recommendation on Instagram. This post contained a selfie of a woman with the words “I need a boyfriend 🎀 Age doesn’t matter”. A quick glance at this user’s profile shows that they have posted dozens of times with the same caption over the past week. “Literally every time the window of suggested topics pops up, I have to scroll through 2-4 of these posts before I see anything normal,” the editor wrote. “I click ‘not interested’ and report each one, but they keep popping up anyway.”
This post appears to be related to some ongoing spam campaign. The exact same selfie and text, marked by an editor, was shared by at least one other account on Threads. And a search of Threads shows that numerous other accounts almost constantly publish posts that say “age doesn’t matter” or “don’t mind your age.”
