Threads users have long joked about publications sometimes bizarre served by its recommendation algorithm since the first days of the application. Recently, some users are starting to notice that another type of strange position appears in their suggestions: publications of random people looking for “friends”.
Articles often have young people who claim to be 18 years old. Engadget has observed many articles of this type appearing in the “threads” functionality of threads “of threads which surfaces the recommended content to disconnected users. It is not clear why these messages appear to be” linked “to other popular publications.
For example, About Spotify of the popular user of the Threads Chris Messina was suggested on the domestic flow of threads for disconnected users. By clicking in the post, an article “linked” from the head of the sons Adam Mosseri. Under this position, however, was another position “linked” to an account pretending to be an 18 -year -old girl in 11th year.
For any reason, threads seem to surface many other articles of this type in its function “associated threads”. For example, the following message was also recommended as an “linked” item elsewhere in the application. An overview of the profile of this user shows that he published the same thing – a photo followed by a WhatsApp link – more than 30 times in the last five days.
And here is what the editor -in -chief of Engadget, Aaron Souppouris, was recently recommended as a “bound” wire “under one of my own messages while being disconnected.
Since Threads has reached more than 350 million users, it is not surprising that the platform will see an influx of spam. Meta Exec Mosseri said the company had seen an increase In “Spam Attacks” in July 2023, shortly after the launch of the service. Last year, the company said it worked to control engagement baits.
But although the simple presence of spam on a platform for the size of threads is not unexpected, it is weird that the application recommends these messages so frequently. Meta did not answer specific questions about these articles or why they are presented as “linked” content, but have confirmed that spam publications should not be presented as recommended content in the application.
In particular, Spammy publications also seem to appear as recommendations in other parts of Meta applications. A Reddit user recently noticed a strange post which appeared as a recommendation on Instagram. This article presented a woman’s selfie with the words “I need a bf 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 🎀 EAST.” A quick glance at the profile of this user shows that he has published dozens of times with the same legend in last week. . “I press” not interested “and I point out all those I see, but they continue to present themselves.”
The message seems to be linked to a kind of current spam campaign. The same selfie and the same text reported by the Redditor was shared by at least another Threads account. And research on threads show that many other accounts almost constantly share messages saying that “age does not matter” or “does not bother you age”.
Have you seen articles like this in your recommendations on the wires? Contact yourself in Karissa.bell [at] Engadget.com or on signal on karissabe. 51.
