Social media used to be full of real people posting about their real life. Levels of engagement and a desire to go viral were the furthest thing from people’s minds. However, now, bots and engagement farmers are everywhere, and you’ve likely fallen for some of their bait. Possibly even on Meta’s Threads, where engagement bait seems to be increasing.
Threads Hates Engagement Bait As Much As You Do
Whether you have switched from X/Twitter to Threads, or use both together, you may have noticed an uptick in engagement bait. Elon Musk’s platform is absolutely full of it, which is one of the reasons why I use X/Twitter less these days. But unfortunately, Threads is suffering from an influx of engagement bait too.
In case you’re not sure what engagement farming and engagement bait is, it’s essentially any social media post purely designed to get a reaction. The poster wants people to comment, to share, and to engage emotionally. And it doesn’t matter whether the engagement is positive or negative. This Threads post has been cited as an obvious example.
This increase in engagement bait has been noticed and discussed on Threads. And one particular conversation led the Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, to reply. In between defending Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg for previous comments, he acknowledged that Threads has an engagement bait problem, and promised that they’re working on a fix.
Acknowledging the problem is a good start, and suggests that the Threads devs are at least aware that engagement bait is increasing. However, without any added details, “working to get it under control” could mean anything. So we need to hope that the “More to come” means that we, the users, will be filled in on what’s happening behind the scenes at some point.
All We Can Do Is Not Fall for Engagement Farmers
There are two main issues for social media platforms that want (or at least claim to want) to fix the problem of engagement bait.
- Engagement is good for social media platforms, so while Threads may not want the platform overwhelmed by bait, it also benefits from it.
- How do you spot actual engagement farming from genuinely good social media posts that just happen to earn high levels of engagement?
Which all means that we, the users, cannot really rely on Threads to fix this issue. Instead, we need to not let the engagement farmers herd us like sheep into engaging with their content. Resist the urge to bite the bait, and just carry on scrolling past the obvious hook instead. I actually go one better and mute the poster responsible.
