Why is Threads recommending these weird spammy posts from people looking for 'friends'?

Threads users have long joked about the sometimes bizarre posts served up by its recommendation algorithm since the early days of the app. Lately though, some users are starting to notice another type of strange post appear in their suggestions: posts from random people looking for "friends."

The posts often feature selfies of young people whose profiles claim to be 18. Engadget has observed numerous such posts appearing in Threads' "related threads" feature that surfaces recommended content to logged-out users. It’s not clear why these posts are appearing as "related" to other popular recommended posts.

For example, this post about Spotify from popular Threads user Chris Messina was suggested on Threads’ home feed to logged out users. Clicking into the post surfaced a "related" post from Threads head Adam Mosseri. Underneath that post, however, was another "related" post from an account claiming to be an 18-year-old girl in 11th grade.

Screenshot via Threads

For whatever reason, Threads seems to be surfacing many other such posts in its "related threads" feature. For example, the following post was also recommended as a "related" post elsewhere in the app. A look at this user's profile shows that they have posted the same thing — a photo followed by a WhatsApp link — more than 30 times in the last five days.

Screenshot via Threads

And here's what Engadget's editor-in-chief Aaron Souppouris was recently recommended as a "related" thread" underneath one of my own posts while logged out. 

Screenshot via Threads

As Threads has grown to more than 350 million users, it’s not surprising that the platform would see an influx of spam. Meta exec Mosseri said the company had seen an increase in "spam attacks" in July of 2023, not long after the service launched. Last year, the company said it was working to get engagement bait under control. 

But while the mere presence of spam on a platform the size of Threads isn’t unexpected, it's bizarre that the app is recommending these posts so frequently. Meta didn’t respond to specific questions about these posts or why they are being featured as "related" content, but confirmed that spammy posts shouldn't be featured as recommended content in the app. 

Notably, spammy posts seem to be appearing as recommendations in other parts of Meta's apps too. One Reddit user recently noticed a strange post that appeared as a recommendation on Instagram. This post featured a selfie of a woman with the words "I need a bf 🎀 Age don’t mind." A quick look at that user's profile shows they've posted dozens of times with that same caption over the last week. “Literally every time the suggested Threads window shows up, I have to scroll through 2-4 posts like this before seeing something normal," the Redditor wrote. "I press ‘not interested’ and report every one I see, but they still keep showing up."

Screenshot via Threads

The post seems to be related to some kind of ongoing spam campaign. The exact same selfie and text flagged by the Redditor was shared by at least one other Threads account. And searches on Threads show numerous other accounts are almost constantly sharing posts saying "age doesn’t matter" or "don’t mind age."

Have you seen posts like this in your recommendations on Threads? Get in touch at karissa.bell [at] engadget.com or on Signal at karissabe.51.

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