In today’s Vatnik Soup, I’ll talk about engagement farming: a cynical social media tactic to rack up likes, shares, and comments. From rage farming to AI-powered outrage factories, engagement farming is reshaping online discourse and turning division into profit.

Engagement farming is a social media tactic aimed at getting maximum likes, shares, and comments, with truth being optional. It thrives on provocative texts, images, or videos designed to spark strong reactions, boost reach, and turn online outrage into clicks and cash.

One subset of engagement farming is rage farming: a tactic built to provoke strong negative emotions through outrageous or inflammatory claims. By triggering anger or moral outrage, these posts often generate 100s or even 1,000s of heated comments, amplifying their reach.

Engagement farming works because our brains are wired to react more strongly to emotionally charged content, especially outrage. Anger, fear, and moral shock grab attention faster than facts, keeping us glued to posts and boosting their reach.

Social media algorithms reward this by pushing high-engagement posts to more users. Outrage sparks comments, shares, and quote-tweets, creating a feedback loop. The more you react, the more the platform amplifies the very contents that upset you.

Many engagement farming accounts have no real ideology — their cynical approach to social media is to post whatever triggers the most reactions. Outrage, conspiracy, fake news—anything goes, as long as it boosts clicks, comments, and followers.

Since Elon took over X and Trump won the presidency, fact-checking and other safeguards on X and Meta’s platforms have largely vanished. False or misleading posts now face little pushback, no matter how many people they reach. Musk doesn’t seem to care.

With X’s ad revenue share and bonus payouts tied to engagement, lying online has become a viable business model. The more outrage and clicks a post gets, the more money it earns, which makes facts completely optional. A predictable consequence of the monetization model for “content creators”.

In countries like India, where average incomes are low, some have discovered they can make a good living through engagement farming. False claims, clickbait, and outrage posts can earn far more than many local jobs. Many of these accounts focus on divisive foreign topics:

Immigration in Europe/US, American politics, anti-EU narratives, or pro-Kremlin talking points are commonly used. By posting highly polarizing content, they provoke strong emotional reactions, driving engagement and turning online division into a profitable export.

Another reason many India-based engagement farming accounts push narratives about immigration, birth rates, conspiracy theories, and racist tropes is simple: Elon Musk often amplifies this kind of content to his massive audience of 200 million followers.

By sharing their posts, Elon can grow individual accounts at a massive pace. For many of these grifters, the number one goal is therefore to be noticed by the site’s owner, because one retweet from him can supercharge their reach and income overnight.

With most anonymous engagement farming accounts or networks, it’s nearly impossible to know their country of origin. Some have been exposed as operating from India, Cambodia, and Russia, often posting on foreign politics purely to cash in on outrage.

Which is why the world’s richest man is now surrounded by assflies like Ian Miles Cheong AKA @stillgray & @cb_doge - both constant commentators on US politics. Cheong is from Malaysia, lives in Dubai, and has never set foot in the US, whereas @cb_doge is based in India.

So next time you see a post on X raging about immigration or claiming “blue-eyed Europeans” are being replaced by people from Africa or the Middle East, remember: it might just be another engagement farmer from Uttar Pradesh, India, desperately trying to make a buck.

Malign actors like Russia and Iran are also financing these influencers. For example, Russian state actors covertly sent around $10M to Tenet Media through shell companies and crypto to pay influencers to spread anti-Ukraine, anti-Democrat content.

It scales down to individual posts too. In 2024, documents showed @AlphaFox78 was paid $100 per post by Russian proxy Semen “AussieCossack” Boikov to spread a fake voter-fraud videos as part of a broader campaign. Boikov is one of the most active pro-Kremlin actors online.

Today, engagement farming is being automated and supercharged with AI. For example, Ottawa-based developer Saihajpreet Singh runs an AI bot pumping out 2,000 pro-Trump posts a day, boosted by Elon Musk and MAGA influencers, growing a massive following in months.

The approach is still the same cynical grift: no real ideology, just digital mercenaries pushing whatever narrative pays the most. With AI, one person can run a 24/7 outrage factory, flooding people’s timelines and erasing genuine human interaction online.

Amoral grifters disregard both facts and real-world consequences. Accounts like Jackson Hinkle or Sulaiman Ahmed, who also worked for the Tate brothers, get millions of views by posting blatantly fake images, exacerbating hatred and frustration.

People online are increasingly not interacting with real people anymore, a reality that mirrors the “Dead Internet Theory.” From anonymous troll accounts to “influencers” with smiling profile pics, many timelines are now dominated by bots or AI-assisted operators.

Even accounts using a real name are often automated or fake to some degree: scheduling posts, recycling old content, pretending to be someone else, or running scripts to boost reach. Despite Musk’s stated aims, Twitter/X is now less of a free speech town square, and more of an automated content battlefield.

So, what’s the solution? I think at some point we’ll see a split—“human” social media with strong ID verification, and “wild west” platforms like X and Facebook where AI runs rampant. The choice will be between authenticity and the algorithmic free-for-all.

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Vatnik Soup — Kle•art