Every few days, LinkedIn serves me the same type of post. A stranger did something amazing on an airplane, or a toddler said something wise about B2B sales, and the writer’s whole life changed.
It’s all related in 12 short lines with a question at the end. None of it reads like something that happened to a real person. It reads like bait, and it usually is. In fact, experts call posts like this “engagement farming” – and you’re likely falling for it every time you log on to social media.
There’s a reason people post like this online: it pays. More replies bring more reach, and reach turns into sponsorships, brand deals or, on some platforms, straight cash for views. Your interaction with a post is helping that user’s bank account.
Graham Mann, who founded the content strategy firm SEOTakeoff, said there are several types of engagement farming that usually suck users in and push them to engage with content. “The engagement-farming tactic I see most often is [called] fake specificity,” he said. “The post gives you just enough detail to feel like a real story, but not enough to verify it.”
Then it ends with a question built to make you correct it, confess or pick a side. “It works because the platform does not care whether the reaction is admiration, anger or secondhand embarrassment,” Mann said. “A reply is a reply. The post only needs to create a tiny unresolved itch.”
Other “common engagement-farming tactics are false vulnerability, manufactured outrage, curiosity gaps and identity bait,” according to James Halder, who wrote “The Psychology of Influencer Marketing.” “All four share one move: Strip out the nuance. A balanced take gives nobody anything to push against.”
Katie Notopoulos, a senior correspondent for Business Insider who often reports on tech, laid out some examples of these types of posts on Threads:
With engagement farming, you get fake confessions, staged fights, a story that hides its ending and posts that dare you to pick a side. Once you do, you feel pushed to defend your position.
“People reply to correct it or back it up, and both reactions increase engagement,” Halder said. “Knowing the trick doesn’t switch off the response, because it’s automatic. You spot the move and comment anyway.”
Psychologist and digital communication consultant Andrea Vittorini said the smartest bait is not aimed at your opinion. It is aimed at you.
“The post implicitly asks, ‘What kind of person are you if you disagree?’” Vittorini said. “That converts a content reaction into a defense of self-image.”
Knowing it is a trick changes nothing. “We may know that a post is manipulative and still feel compelled to correct it, defend a group, signal our values or show that we are not fooled,” he said.
People “engagement farm” on every social media app.
Ken Herron, a five-time chief marketing officer, explained that the bait is retooled for each platform.
“LinkedIn rewards comments that extend discussion. X rewards conflict and rapid replies. Instagram rewards emotional storytelling and saves. TikTok rewards watch time, reactions and remixing,” Herron said. “Engagement farming is simply creators learning to speak the algorithm’s native language.”
The bait works best on people who are already scared. Jill Gugino Panté, a careers expert at the University of Delaware, sees it aimed at job-seekers.
“A common tactic I’ve seen is weaponizing panic,” Panté said. “When job seekers are facing endless rejections, anxiety takes over. They are looking for any kind of magic solution to fix what they think they’re doing wrong, so they click and comment on posts out of desperation and panic. Posts like ‘If you don’t send a thank-you note within 45 seconds of your interview, you’re blacklisted’ don’t provide real solutions but instead stress the job seeker out more.”
“When a post uses a hook like ‘the one thing recruiters never tell you,’ our brains go into career survival mode,” Panté said. “Even if you know deep down it’s probably bait, the fear of missing out on that one ‘secret’ that could finally land you a job is way stronger than your skepticism.”
Chase enough fake rules like that one, and there’s less time left for the parts of a job search that actually work.
Zorica Nastasic via Getty Images
But the tactic extends far beyond social media, and it’s not going anywhere.
None of this is new. Jeff Moore, a music marketing strategist and founder of Nuance Media Group, said the music industry was farming reactions long before social media.
“Back in the 1940s, Frank Sinatra’s press agent would pay girls $5 each to scream and faint in the aisles at his shows,” Moore said. “The staged hysteria worked so well that when real fans saw it, they took over and ran with it.”
The tools changed, not the trick. “After Lil Nas X rolled out his ‘Satan Shoes’ collab in 2021, he admitted he baited his critics on purpose, saying one of them ‘fell right into the trap,’” Moore said.
Rage is only half of it. “The ‘feel good’ flip side of this tactic is what I call manufactured wholesomeness. Some creators are starting to call it ‘joybait,’” Moore said. “It’s the kind of feel-good, ‘authentic’ content that is engineered to make you share because of the positive emotional connection you feel.”
The reward changed, too. “X shares ad revenue based on engagement, so posts that provoke these reactions can literally become income,” Moore said.
Ashley Capps runs AshCapps Media, a marketing communications firm that mostly works with nonprofits. She’s also been on TikTok since 2019, and spent months reverse-engineering two advertising campaigns after noticing something off: one for a health app called PCOS Pal, the other for a surveillance app called Cheaterbuster. No one paid her to do it, and she was not hired by anyone in an official capacity.
“Both use the same machine,” she said. “Manufactured emotional appeal as the hook, a templated script, a network of accounts posting as personal experience, and a paid supply chain behind it. What changes is the feeling they sell and the action they want. The first sells distrust of your own body. The second sells distrust of your own partner.”
PCOS Pal engagement-farmed using patient testimonials. “I documented at least 10 unrelated accounts posting the same crying-to-camera confession, ‘my labs came back fine and I am falling apart,’ with the app named as the thing that finally helped,” Capps said. “The same advertising brief was pasted, word for word, into the captions of supposedly personal posts on different accounts.”
Capps’s research notes cite a hiring post from Slayyy, the company behind PCOS Pal. The post, since taken down, asked creators to produce ‘relatable thumb-stopping video ads that drive subscriptions on our iOS app,’ the exact kind of content designed to look personal.”
Her rule for spotting an engagement-farming testimonial is blunt. “Same script, different faces means a campaign, not a confession,” she said. “Look for the product in the frame, because the payload is always there.”
Cheaterbuster, meanwhile, engagement-farmed through staged “your husband cheated” videos, Capps said, “built to make you furious and comment.” Fact-checker Lead Stories traced one such video to Cheaterbuster’s website and confirmed it was staged advertising.
Both Cheaterbuster and PCOS Pal did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
“The content sells suspicion, and it does it by borrowing real solidarity,” Capps said. “A staged betrayal video pulls women into the comments to support a person who does not exist. They share their own real stories under a script, and they send the video to a friend as recognition: Look, she is going through what I went through.”
“The fear and doubt the video manufactures are the exact feelings women carry in a real betrayal, so genuine experience gets poured into a fake,” Capps explained. “The same manufactured anxiety makes one woman comment her own story, one buy the app, and one carry that planted suspicion home and aim it at a partner who did nothing.”
The airplane stranger and the wise toddler talked about on LinkedIn are bait, and you know it. Herron suggests you ask yourself one question in the half second before you start typing.
“Would this post still be worth reading if comments were disabled?” he said. If the answer is no, keep scrolling.
