The Era of Slopaganda

In our modern day, the inventive genius of man has perfected a machinery of communication which, through speeding up and extending the influence of information and ideas, has given propagandists an efficient system to bombard the masses with their message.  However, the rise of generative AI has now filled the information space with a new, unique and somewhat unwanted form of propaganda: slopaganda.

Slopaganda is a portmanteau.  If that makes no sense to you, let me break it down.  A portmanteau refers to a new word made by blending the sounds and meanings of two separate words.  For example, “brunch” is a portmanteau because it combines the words “breakfast” and “lunch”.  Therefore, “slopaganda” is a combination of the words “slop” and “propaganda”.  The term was coined by philosopher Michał Klincewicz (Tilburg University), Mark Alfano (Macquarie University / Australian Catholic University), and independent media researcher Amir Ebrahimi Fard.  It contains the word “slop” because it refers to low-quality, mass-produced artificial intelligence content.

Despite its fun sounding name, slopaganda is nefariously used to flood newsfeeds in order to overshadow credible reporting.  Every major shift in mass communication has, sooner or later, been harnessed to shape beliefs and slopaganda is no different. Like traditional propaganda, it is used as a form of communication to manipulate beliefs, emotions and attention to achieve political ends.  A recent example of slopaganda is the Lego-themed social media posts used by Iran as a tool to soften the regime’s image globally. 

Social media is the vehicle of choice for slopagandists because they are able to exploit a key vulnerability: the emotional fatigue of social media users worn down by a constant stream of news.  In fact, because many people turn to social media platforms in order to unplug or escape from daily realities, it is in this state of passive scrolling that their critical thinking defenses are most vulnerable. Because slopaganda creates a continuous background noise that exhausts our cognitive resources, slopaganda is able to creep past logic and lodge itself in areas of the brain which process and shape future decisions.  But although some of the quality of slopaganda is comically low, quality is actually irrelevant.  Amidst information overload, the brain will work to filter content not based on quality but based on emotional stimuli. 

What the architects of slopaganda have discovered is that influencing the public no longer has to consist of a single strong narrative.  Rather, they use slopaganda to flood information spaces by using variations of the same narrative, relying heavily on bots.  In fact, Cloudflare’s Radar dashboard puts bots at 57.5% of all HTTP requests to HTML content and humans at 42.5%.  In simple terms, bots now outnumber humans online.  But ultimately, whoever or whatever is flooding the internet, the reality is that whoever can fill the social media feed will essentially define what version of “truth” will be accepted by the majority.  Aside from this, what has researchers most concerned is that people will become sceptical about everything, even what is true.

There are many instances where we see truth closely associated with God’s character.  When the Lord passed by Moses on Mt Sinai, we read in Exodus 34:6:  And the Lord passed before him and proclaimed, “The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth.  In a prayer of David, he testifies of God in similar fashion.  Psalm 86:15:  But You, O Lord, are a God full of compassion, and gracious, longsuffering and abundant in mercy and truth.  After Pilate’s famous question, “what is truth?” we see the response of Jesus in John 18:37:  You say rightly that I am a king.  For this cause I was born, and for this cause I have come into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth.  Everyone who is of the truth hears My voice.     

As lies, propaganda and slopaganda continue to permeate the world, it is so important for mankind to turn to the only reliable source of truth: God’s Word.  Psalm 119:160:  the entirety of Your word is truth.  In fact, God’s truth has been given to us in a threefold way:-

• His Word is truth.  John 17:17:  Sanctify them by Your truth.  Your word is truth.

• His Son is truth.  John 14:6:  I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No man comes to the Father except through Me.

• His Spirit is truth.  1 John 5:6: And it is the Spirit who bears witness, because the Spirit is truth.

The Bible treats truth as a treasure because God’s truth will never let you down.  It will bless you; teach you; satisfy you; strengthen you; sanctify you and rescue you.  In contrast, the world treats truth as an inconvenience—an obstacle to sinful living, rebellion and wickedness.  The message to the believer is clear: it’s time for less social media and more of God’s truth.