Meta is bringing facial recognition tech back to its apps more than three years after it shut down Facebook’s “face recognition” system amid a broader backlash against the technology. Now, the social network will begin to deploy facial recognition tools on Facebook and Instagram to fight scams and help users who have lost access to their accounts, the company said in an update.

The first test will use facial recognition to detect scam ads that use the faces of celebrities and other public figures. “If our systems suspect that an ad may be a scam that contains the image of a public figure at risk for celeb-bait, we will try to use facial recognition technology to compare faces in the ad against the public figure’s Facebook and Instagram profile pictures,” Meta explained in a blog post. “If we confirm a match and that the ad is a scam, we’ll block it.”

The company said that it’s already begun to roll the feature out to a small group of celebs and public figures and that it will begin automatically enrolling more people into the feature “in the coming weeks,” though individuals have the ability to opt out of the protection. While Meta already has systems in place to review ads for potential scams, the company isn’t always able to catch “celeb-bait” ads as many legitimate companies use celebrities and public figures to market their products, Monika Bickert, VP of content policy at Meta, said in a briefing. “This is a real time process,” she said of the new facial recognition feature. “It's faster and it's more accurate than manual review.”

Separately, Meta is also testing facial recognition tools to address another long-running issue on Facebook and Instagram: account recovery. The company is experimenting with a new “video selfie” option that allows users to upload a clip of themselves, which Meta will then match to their profile photos, when users have been locked out of their accounts. The company will also use it in cases of a suspected account compromise to prevent hackers from accessing accounts using stolen credentials.

The tool won’t be able to help everyone who loses access to a Facebook or Instagram account. Many business pages, for example, don’t include a profile photo of a person, so those users would need to use Meta’s existing account recovery options. But Bickert says the new process will make it much more difficult for bad actors to game the company’s support tools “It will be a much higher level of difficulty for them in trying to bypass our systems,” Bickert said.

With both new features, Meta says it will “immediately delete” facial data that’s used for comparisons and that the scans won’t be used for another purpose. The company is also making the features optional, though celebrities will need to opt-out of the scam ad protection rather than opt-ion.

That could draw criticism from privacy advocates, particularly given Meta’s messy history with facial recognition. The company previously used the technology to power automatic photo-tagging, which allowed the company to automatically recognize the faces of users in photos and videos. The feature was discontinued in 2021, with Meta deleting the facial data of more than 1 billion people, citing “growing societal concerns.” The company also faces lawsuits, notably from the Texas and Illinois, over its use of the tech. Meta paid $650 million to settle a lawsuit related to the Illinois law and $1.4 billion to resolve a similar suit in Texas.

It’s notable, then, that the new tools won’t be available in either Illinois or Texas to start. It also won’t roll out to users in the United Kingdom or European Union as the company is “continuing to have conversations there with regulators” in the region, according to Bickert. But the company is “hoping to scale this technology globally sometime in 2025,” according to a Meta spokesperson.

An artist who was able to pay off credit card debt, a photographer making extra cash by replying to the most polarizing posts she can find, a food blogger trying to start interesting conversations. These are some of the creators Meta is paying to post on Threads.

Meta introduced the invitation-only program in April, but has only shared limited details about how it works. Engadget spoke with half a dozen creators who have joined the program over the last few months. They described their strategies for reaching the required engagement metrics, and the sometimes confusing nature of Threads’ recommendation algorithm.

Creators are sorted into different tiers of the program which determines how much their bonuses can be and what kinds of metrics their posts need to hit. None of the creators who spoke with Engadget knew how or why they had been selected for the bonus program, though they all had an established following on Instagram. (One of the known requirements is a professional account on Instagram.)

Audrey Woulard is a photographer with more than 25,000 followers on Instagram and about 5,500 followers on Threads. She uses her Facebook and Instagram accounts to promote her portrait photography business. But when she was invited to the Threads bonus program, she saw an opportunity to experiment with different types of content.

Her strategy, she says, is all about replies. She exclusively focuses on replying to other users’ posts rather than creating her own. “I'm not necessarily generating content on my own,” she explains. “I'm kind of activating other people's content.” By focusing on replies, she says she’s able to reach the required 60 Threads with at least 750 views each to qualify for a $500 monthly bonus.

This has helped her become particularly attuned to the types of subjects that are likely to attract a lot of views. “Polarizing content, anything that keeps people talking,” she explains. Specifically, she looks for topics that people tend to have strong opinions about, like marriage, parenting, aging and politics, though she tries to avoid replying to obvious engagement bait.

Woulard’s experience isn’t unique. Threads defaults to a “for you” timeline that relies heavily on recommended posts rather than posts from accounts you already follow. Meta has also said it doesn’t want to “encourage” users to post about news and politics. Perhaps as a consequence of this, Threads’ “for you” feed often feels a lot slower and less focused on current events than on X.

What the algorithm does prioritize, though, is posts that get a lot of replies, even if they are about a seemingly mundane topic. This has led to a bizarrely random quality to the feed, what blogger Max Read dubbed “the gas leak social network.” It’s not uncommon to see a recommended post from someone you’re totally unconnected to talking about a trivial inconvenience, or a medical condition or some other anodyne anecdote. What these posts do have in common, though, is lots of replies.

It’s also created an opportunity for people looking to game the app’s algorithm by posting spammy content, generic questions or polarizing takes meant to attract as many replies as possible. (Meta execs have said they’re trying to fix this issue after a surge in such posts, even as they acknowledge that posts with replies are most likely to be recommended.)

But for Woulard, Meta’s emphasis on “public conversations” has worked in her favor. She says that so far she’s been able to max out three months worth of bonuses simply by replying to Threads. Woulard generates more income from her Facebook page, but enjoys the simplicity of the Threads bonus program. “It's so easy for me to make this money, I can literally sit in my room and reply to a bunch in 30 minutes.”

For Meta, offering bonuses to Instagram creators to post on Threads is part of its strategy to use Instagram to grow the year-old service. The company has leaned heavily on Instagram to grow Threads, which has already drawn 200 million users. But there were also bound to be some growing pains, says social media consultant Matt Navarra.

“I think people find it harder to create for platforms like Threads,” Navarra tells Engadget. “Writing interesting, engaging posts for a text-based platform, like X, Twitter or Threads is a different set of skills. And I think it's slightly tricky for some sorts of creators.”

Josh Kirkham, an artist who specializes in Bob Ross-style painting videos, has experienced this firsthand. With nearly 800,000 followers on Instagram, he’s in the highest tier of the bonus program, which makes him eligible to earn up to $5,000 a month from his posts on Threads. He’s been able to max out his bonus by sharing painting videos clipped from his livestreams on Instagram and TikTok.

Despite the success, he hasn’t been able to detect any patterns about what types of videos are likely to take off. He has more than 150,000 followers on Threads but, like other creators in the bonus program, relies on the app’s recommendation algorithm for his posts to get noticed. “Initially, I was posting mountain videos, and those were doing the best compared to everything else,” he says, “And then a week later, every mountain video was just getting like, nothing. Some of the times the videos that I think are going to do well don't do well at all, and vice versa.”

Kirkham says that he almost never replies to Threads posts when he’s trying to hit a bonus because he worries it will dilute his chances of getting the 5,000 views per post necessary to earn the max payout. Still, he says he’s grateful for the program as a full-time artist and creator. “It’s enabled me to pay off my credit card debt and then raise my credit score immensely,” he says. “I’m hoping for at least a few more.”

Nearly all of the creators who spoke to Engadget also expressed some skepticism that Meta would continue the bonus program at its current level for very long. In the past, the company has offered creators generous bonuses when it’s trying to boost a new format like Instagram Reels or Facebook Live only for those payments to eventually dwindle as more people join and Meta inevitably shifts its strategy — and funds for creators — somewhere else.

Logan Reavis is a photographer with nearly 50,000 followers on Instagram and about 8,500 on Threads. Though she has a bigger following on Instagram, she says Threads’ algorithm feels more favorable to creators. “The [Threads] algorithm works entirely different, especially as a photographer,” she says. “I feel like it's been hard to share my photography on Instagram, but it's encouraged on Threads. I actually reach an entirely different audience.”

Even so, she says she’s had to grapple with the quirks of the Threads algorithm and its penchant for highlighting engagement bait. “Responding to threads that have a lot of comments or conversation is what brings in my bonus views more, which is frustrating too because there's a lot of clickbait,” she says. Reavis so far hasn’t been able to reach her maximum potential $500 monthly bonus on Threads.

While creators are part of Meta’s strategy to make Threads its next billion-person app, the company hasn’t always been able to explain what its newest app is actually for. So it shouldn’t be surprising that even the creators it’s paying to post there view it as something of an experiment.

“I still don't think it has its own unique place in the social media ecosystem,” says Navarra. “It doesn't really have much of its own identity or personality, and I think that's one of its many problems at the moment.”

Bluesky seems to have a bold new strategy to entice potential new users: posting on Threads. The rival social media service joined Threads amid a surge in complaints from users who are increasingly frustrated with Meta’s policies.

While complaints about Meta’s policies aren’t a new topic, they’ve gained new prominence over the last week amid complaints about the surge in engagement bait on the platform, as well as Threads’ sometimes inexplicable content moderation decisions. Meta exec Adam Mosseri, who runs the Threads app, has said the company is looking into both issues. But in the meantime, there’s been an increase in discussions about Bluesky, the decentralized service that has a very different philosophy when it comes to algorithms and moderation.

On Wednesday, Bluesky created an account on Threads, and promptly began pitching itself as an alternative platform for those frustrated with Meta. The strategy seems to be having an effect. “Bluesky” has been a trending topic on Threads for two days in a row and, at the time of this writing “Bluesky vs Meta moderation” was trending on the platform.

“We're not like the other girls... we're not owned by a billionaire,” Bluesky wrote in a post Thursday. “Your social experience should be yours to customize, not bent to the whims of whoever the owner of the platform is.”

While not the first time Bluesky has lightly trolled a rival (see its X post from earlier this week), the company is seizing on genuine frustration among Threads users. Besides the complaints about blatant engagement bait in their feeds, users have been questioning Meta’s seemingly aggressive moderation tactics on Threads. The company already throttles political content on the app, has taken a heavy handed approach to moderation of the service, according to many users. A number of people have reported having posts actioned by Meta for using the word “cracker” or “saltines,” as The Verge points out. Social media consultant Matt Navarra shared that he was penalized for sharing a BBC article about the viral “goodbye Meta AI” hoax on his Threads account.

Bluesky, on the other hand, has taken a much more flexible approach to content moderation. It puts most decisions in the hands of users, who are able to decide what kind of content they want to see or not, and allows users to run their own moderation services. “We're always doing baseline moderation, meaning that we are providing you with a default moderated experience when you come in [to Bluesky],” Bluesky CEO jay Graber told Engadget earlier this year. “And then on top of that, you can customize things.”

Whether the new attention on Bluesky will result in a significant number of departures to the service is so far unclear. Bluesky currently has about 10.8 million users, according to a dashboard tracking its growth. And while it’s not clear how many new people arrived in the last couple days, it suggests there’s been a bit of a surge over the past month as Bluesky previously grew to about 8.8 million users immediately following the shutdown of X in Brazil last month.