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Engagement Farming & Lawyers

-- By RafaelMiranda - 17 Apr 2024

What is Engagement Farming?

A LinkedIn? "influencer" published a short story on his page:

There was a story about an associate and a partner at a large law firm in Manhattan—the associate constantly used the delayed delivery feature on Microsoft Outlook, setting it so certain emails would send off at 10pm or later. The effect was intended to make him appear to be working harder than other people around him. In reality he wasn't always awake at 1am sending emails as much as it looked like. The effect went unnoticed until he sent an email to a newly elected partner. Interestingly, the partner set up his Microsoft Outlook to auto-reply any emails from associates sent after 10pm with the sentence "Please see me in the morning thx.". The associate woke up to the email and endured one of the most stressful mornings of his year. To the associate's unfortunate surprise, the partner had no idea why this associate was outside his door. If you liked this story, please follow me on Linkedin and comment down below.

The influencer's post received over a thousand likes and countless views. By some statistics the post was successful simply because the story gained attention (source needed). In modern terms, this type of action is called "engagement farming". Put succinctly, engagement farming is a blanket term for the techniques entities use to steal your attention in the context of social media usage. Engagement farming is difficult to define because the boundaries that separate posting information in good faith and publishing "content" for the sake of exposure are difficult to identify if you're unaware that your attention is being mined.

Engagement farming is separate from the relatively older phenomenons of click-farming and content farming as its usage is narrowed to the creating engagement on social media. Click farm creates simulated traffic for pay-per-click web pages and content farming deals more directly with the creation of content to create ad revenue.

Why is it bad? Can it really be defined as bad or good?

Framing the discussion on whether engagement farming is good or bad is difficult because the aims of engagement farming lie in "farming one's attention". On the one hand, its easy to say the practice of engagement farming is harmful because it deceives internet users and robs them of their attention—as Johnathan Haidt has articulated. On the other hand, how do we approach the concept of attention as a quasi-tangible object, one that if treated a certain way should be or could be met with government regulation?

Haidt mentions attention can be thought of as a "public good", which

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