Instagram boss Adam Mosseri has acknowledged the growth of engagement bait posts on Threads.
The platform is seen as one of the next places to head to, alongside Bluesky, for people frustrated by the toxicity of X. But former BBC journalist and current Bloomberg commentator Dave Lee highlighted the rise of disingenuous engagement farming on the platform, in his own Threads post.
Mosseri, who also leads the Threads team, wrote in response: “We’ve seen an increase in engagement bait on Threads and we’re working to get it under control. More to come.”
But what is engagement bait? It’s a post designed solely to get other users to interact with it, often by making them angry.
The example highlighted by Lee is of someone purporting to be shaming an older woman for wearing a mini-skirt, despite using an image cribbed from elsewhere. The post is a fabricated anecdote.
Meta’s Threads has attempted to promote an actively non-toxic image, most notably by limiting the dissemination of political content, a move announced in February 2024.
Mosseri also stated that “we also don’t want to proactively amplify political content from accounts you don't follow”, in a move that affected both Threads and Instagram.
The rise of ‘rage bait’ content is not a new issue on Threads, however.
A month ago, Business Insider’s Kate Notopoulos experimented at exploiting the platform’s algorithms, and found she was able to amass huge numbers of replies — and a fairly large following — just by posing provocative questions on Threads.
In July, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said Threads had reached 175 million monthly active users. It is a much larger platform than fellow X rival Bluesky, in large part thanks to its active promotion on other Meta platforms, most notably Instagram.
However, Bluesky saw a jump in sign-ups activity in the UK in August, following Elon Musk’s comments about the riots at the beginning of the month.
Musk suggested civil war was “inevitable” in the UK, and has since openly campaigned in support of Trump’s second term in office.
