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View all search resultsEurope enters the slop war
Contrary to the freedom of speech narrative espoused by tech moguls and the US leader, the coming battle centered on the "slopification" of public discourse pits free thinkers and societies against power-hungry plutocrats and wannabe autocrats.
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Digital monitors display the logos of United States technology company xAI and its generative AI chatbot Grok, along with a picture of xAI founder Elon Musk, in this illustration created on Jan. 13, 2025, in Toulouse, France. (AFP/Lionel Bonaventure)
W
hen The Economist and Merriam-Webster announced “slop” as their word of the year, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella complained but few were surprised.
The past 18 months have been characterized by an unrelenting flood of brain rot slop, political slop, scam slop and, above all, porn slop. Recent estimates suggest Elon Musk’s Grok AI posts one nonconsensual pornographic image of a woman per minute on X.
Not so long ago, social media companies billed themselves as tools for connecting with real people and keeping up with the news. They have long since abandoned that promise.
Having untethered their platforms from reality, tech barons like Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and X owner Elon Musk now exercise near-monopolistic control over our screens. They use that power to feed users a steady diet of manipulative, dangerous and outright illegal AI-generated junk. Grok has produced sexual abuse images of children as young as 4 years old.
Fortunately, after years of inaction, regulators are stepping in. The European Union just opened an investigation into the spread of child sexual abuse material on Grok. This follows its first enforcement action in December, when it fined X 120 million euros (US$140 million) under the Digital Services Act.
While this hardly makes a dent in Musk’s vast fortune, the fine is not the point. More important is what the EU has ordered X to do: Redesign its scam-ridden blue-check system, tackle ad fraud and restore researcher access so the public can understand the platform’s effects on the information landscape.
These probes set the stage for a confrontation. United States President Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy (NSS) illustrates the stakes of the coming slop war. Released on the same day the X fine was announced, the NSS makes clear the administration’s intention: to back social media moguls as they spread lies, amplify hate, bolster authoritarians and destabilize Europe from within.
