And if not, it's cheap engagement baiting that tends to Facebook-ify places over time. I've seen it happen in real time with reddit.

i think automatically assuming something is done in bad faith is kind of cynical. trends are fun and conversation starters for most people.

but regardless of the original intent, your social media presence is a very easy way to gain information about you that can be used against you.

Whenever I see an art trend of “hey, share your art of x thing” I assume it’s someone collecting images to feed into the AI machine as well. The technological hellscape we live in really turns us against one another. Thanks capitalism.

100%. I dont know why people have been doing this lately. Bsky should be smarter than this

On places that ARENT facebook or instagram, I think it’s just folks genuinely expressing interest in others.
At least that’s how I read it.
But yeah anytime these are on apps where a good chunk of the user base is tech illiterate, like FB/insta, the more likely these are to be social engineering 🫤