Ben Werdmuller, an entrepreneur who leads tech for ProPublica, writes on the trust crisis brewing in Meta’s Threads app. He posted a quick comment about the Internet Archive’s legal troubles, only to find it blew up in unexpected ways. Turns out, Threads’ algorithm tossed his post to folks way outside his usual crowd, and they weren’t happy about the lack of context. He writes: The comments that really surprised me were the ones that accused me of engagement farming. I’ve never received these before, and it made me wonder about the underlying assumptions. Why would this be engagement farming? Why would someone do this? Why would they assume that about me? Turns out, Meta’s been secretly paying select “creators” up to $5,000 per viral post, turning the platform into a digital gold rush. Now, every post is suspect.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.