So-called ‘slop’ is driving people and advertisers from social media. But platforms are also throttling political content
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter and rebranded it as X the platform’s moderation tools have become nearly non-existent, with researchers finding increasing trends of harassment and disinformation. Photograph: Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesWhen a political scandal breaks in Ireland, a fight to own the narrative quickly ensues.
It has been a long time coming, but this could be the moment that marks the end of an era for social media as we know it. Any illusions we may have once held that social media platforms acted as a barometer of public or even niche community opinion – and a place that was worth trying to manipulate – are dead.
It is almost two years since Elon Musk took over Twitter, rebranding it as “X” and cutting at least 75 per cent of its workforce. What happened next has been well documented; the platform’s moderation tools have become nearly nonexistent, with researchers finding increasing trends of harassment and disinformation. People are turning away.
Creator programmes also created new incentives to game the system for profit. Cash payouts, on X at least, are not connected to the quality, accuracy or relevance of content in any meaningful sense; they reward content that is able to game the algorithms, which tends to be things that are sensational, emotive, or often just weird. Enter “Slop”, a word that may make anyone who has worked in a pub think of the end-of-night remnants of discarded drinks congealing in a bucket.
Slop is usually mass produced by AI-driven spam pages and boosted by recommendation algorithms. The motivation is financial – AI content is cheap to mass produce, and there is a chance you might cash in with either a creator fund, by driving traffic to ad-heavy websites, or promoting cheap products and scams. This content is increasingly prevalent across platforms, facilitating the rise of the “zombie internet”.
Sinn-Fein Mary-Lou-Mcdonald Brian-Stanley
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