Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Host Morgan Sung: Hello! Do you like these deep dives? Do you want more? It would be so, so helpful if you could rate and review us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show! Send it to your friends…your frenemies…that one niche micro influencer you kind of have a parasocial relationship with! Maybe they’ll respond, I don’t know!
Ok, let’s get to the show.
[Audio clip from Explosive Media video]
I just looked him in the eye and told him what I saw.
Wait a minute homie, I said Inshallah.
Little orange man, little orange man, it’s the straight of Iran.
Little orange man. Iran!
Morgan Sung: Ok, let me try to explain what’s going on here. So this is an animated video, and it’s clearly AI. The setting is LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean — and it opens by zooming in on this Davy Jones-type character. You know, the cursed pirate with the tentacle beard? But this Davy Jones also looks a lot like President Donald Trump. Instead of a peg leg, he has a golf club. And he’s steering his ship directly through a LEGO gate labeled “Strait of Hormuz.”
[Audio clip from Explosive Media video]
Little orange man, little orange man, get straight out of Hormuz, little orange man. Get out!
Morgan Sung: This is one of dozens of incredibly catchy, viral videos from a small content studio called Explosive Media. All of their videos follow a similar format: LEGO characters, and taking shots at the Trump administration and the United States. Like, calling the president “the Twitter-finger king.”
[Audio clip from Explosive Media video]
Twitter finger king, fake ring, cap master with the lies. Always tweeting great success while your whole damn squad cries.
Morgan Sung: Based on the style, tone, and topics covered, you might think this content is coming from a left-wing American studio. Or maybe a progressive media outlet. It’s not that different from the kind of stuff the Democratic party has posted to appeal to gen z voters.
But there’s a consistent thread through every single video — they all revolve around the war between the US and Iran. And it’s because they’re coming directly from Iran. That’s right, it’s all propaganda.
Wartime propaganda is nothing new. But take a look at the videos spreading across social media today … something feels different.
[Audio clip from Explosive Media video]
Little orange man, little orange man, get straight out of Hormuz, little orange man. Get out!
Morgan Sung: Welcome to the age of slopaganda.
That’s a combination of “slop” as in AI slop and propaganda.
Guest Michal Klincewicz: it’s out of the bottle. The genie is out of the bottle and it’s gonna be wrecking havoc for a while.
Morgan Sung: This is Michal Klincewicz. He’s a professor of computational cognitive science at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He’s one of the leading experts on slopaganda. He actually co-authored a paper on this last year. And he said that the slopaganda that’s coming out of Iran today is very different from the propaganda of past wars. It’s more potent. It’s churned out faster. There’s a clear, consistent narrative that pulls viewers in and convinces them to keep watching.
Slopaganda has gotten really popular, making it harder to discern what’s real, and what’s not. When our information ecosystem is flooded with catchy LEGO music videos, what is it distracting us from? What happens when public opinion can be so easily manipulated by AI slop?
That is the slopagandapocalypse.
Michal Klincewicz: Slopageddon? Is that, is that better, slopageddon? Ooh!
Morgan Sung: I like slopageddon.
Michal Klincewicz: Yeah. That’s better. You know, I just coined a term on your show, slopageddon.
Morgan Sung: Today’s deep dive is all about slopaganda: how it took over our feeds, what it’s doing to our brains, and why the US might be losing the meme war.
Plus, we’re going to get into how we might be able to stop Slopaggeddon.
Ready?
Morgan Sung: By now, you know this goes! Let’s open a new tab: What is slopaganda?
Morgan Sung: Ok let’s break this down. First: slop.
Michal Klincewicz: Slop is kind of mid to low quality AI generated content, that is online.
Morgan Sung: That’s Michal again.
Michal Klincewicz: So text, videos, images, anything of the sort
Morgan Sung: AI slop has been flooding the internet for years now, but more recently we’ve seen social media users embrace it, knowing it’s artificially generated, synthetic media. And that’s led to some slop content going viral. A few weeks ago we talked about an incredibly popular TikTok series called AI Fruit Love Island.
[Audio clip of Fruit Love Island]
Welcome back to Fruit Love Island. Today, we’ve got a steamy challenge.
Morgan Sung: It was basically Love Island, the reality TV dating show, but all of the contestants were sexy anthropomorphized fruit.
This kind of low-quality AI generated content has become the norm online. Then there’s the second part of the word, propaganda, or content that’s designed to deliver some kind of political message, usually to persuade.
Michal Klincewicz: So affect beliefs, perceptions, or emotional states of the audience or a political goal in mind.
Morgan Sung: Propaganda is not always about boosting patriotism on the home front. Across history, countries have used propaganda on their opponents’ citizens, to sow distrust in leadership. Like, during the Vietnam War, there was Hanoi Hannah. She was a Vietnamese broadcaster who recorded English language messages, designed to demoralize Americans GIs.
[Audio clip of Hanoi Hannah]
GI your government has abandoned you . They lied to you, GI. You know you cannot win this war.
Morgan Sung: The US has done it too, and on a massive scale. In fact, the US has done this in Iran. Back in 1953, the CIA helped overthrow Iran’s democratically elected prime minister. They staged riots and planted fake stories in local news outlets to manipulate public opinion. It’s a tactic the US has repeatedly used over the last 70 years: sowing distrust, destabilizing leadership, and engineering a regime change in Syria, Indonesia, Poland, throughout Latin America. I mean, the list goes on and on. Propaganda plays a huge part in it. And when you add AI to the mix?
Michal actually published a research paper about slopaganda last year — long before LEGO AI videos went viral. He’s known his co-authors for years — Mark Alfano, a philosopher who studies neural networks, and Amir Fard, a machine learning expert. Among themselves, they’ve talked about how propaganda has evolved with social media, algorithms, and bot farms. But then, in May of 2024, right as the US presidential election began heating up, they shared an experience that changed how they thought about it.
They were all in Poland for a conference. Since it wasn’t too far from where they were staying, they decided to take a trip to Auschwitz.
Michal Klincewicz: And I think that was a kind of a watershed moment for us because we connected the dots really very dramatically between what was happening and the way that things were talked about in the United States and what we were seeing.
The National Socialist Party of Germany had a propaganda wing. They used the radio, they used the newspapers, but they were delivering a message of disinformation about people that ended up dying there. And I think that for us, this caught fire. We talked about slopaganda right then and there. Eventually, this led up to writing a paper with Amir in November and December of 2024. We sort of channeled that rage and anger. That’s how it happened.
Morgan Sung: In the paper, the researchers detail the one-off deepfakes that went viral during the election: Kamala Harris saying something she never did, the AI generated images that made Taylor Swift look like she endorsed Trump, the voters who got calls from a voice that sounded exactly like then-President Joe Biden, encouraging them to stay home and not vote in the state primary.
[Audio clip of Robocall sent to New Hampshire voters]
Voting this Tuesday only enables the Republicans in their quest to elect Donald Trump again.
Morgan Sung: And then last year, right after inauguration, President Trump himself posted a video and it wasn’t a deepfake. Michal said that was the tipping point that started the descent into slopageddon.
Michal Klincewicz: There was a, I guess, a moment when Donald Trump during an interview or something said something about building a resort in Gaza city after the Israelis sort of move in, I guess. And they will build a resort, a Riviera on the coast of the Mediterranean and an AI video came out showing this and Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump sort of drinking margaritas poolside with Gaza Trump hotel in the background.
[Audio from Donald Trump Gaza video]
Donald’s coming to set you free, bringing the light for all to see. No more tunnels, no more fear. Trump Gaza is finally here.
Michal Klincewicz: That was like the first one that clearly for us was emblematic of this. The first clear case of like, slopaganda as we envisioned it, I think is the Gaza video
Morgan Sung: To be clear, this was a video posted by Donald Trump’s official account. The video starts with Gaza, demolished and reduced to rubble. Then, it’s transformed into a tourist destination. It’s gaudy and over the top, like if Vegas was on the beach. There’s a giant gold statue of President Trump, looming over everyone. There are market stands that sell golden effigies of Trump, and children carry golden balloons of Trump’s face. Elon Musk makes a few appearances, throwing cash at beachgoers.
[Audio from Donald Trump Gaza video]
Trump Gaza shining bright, golden future, a brand new light. Feast and dance, the deal is done. Trump Gaza number one.
Michal Klincewicz: It’s uncanny and it’s almost designed to not take seriously. Right? It’s a way of portraying something abhorrent in a way, something morally problematic, at least, if not despicable, um, through a joke,and it slips past, I think our moral defenses in a way, because we’re fascinated by that, right? Like just kind of watching the train wreck, the moral train wreck in that video, and we watch it to the end. Um, that’s a little bit like maybe reality TV or something.
There’s a kind of thing that happens as you’re watching it. By the end, it’s somehow conceivable.
Morgan Sung: The Trump administration was just the first. Slopaganda flooded elections in Europe, too. Russia’s propaganda machine dates back to the days of the Soviet Union — AI just supercharged it.
[Audio clip of DW News report on AI Hungarian election ads]
One of the defining issues of our times, the use of artificial intelligence. And the risks that it could pose not only to all our jobs, but to democracy itself…
Morgan Sung: This year, during the Hungarian election for prime minister, the country’s social media feeds were overrun with fearmongering AI slop videos.
[Audio clip of DW News report on AI Hungarian election ads]
…a message he’s hammering home with the help of AI…
Morgan Sung: They claimed that Hungarians would be forcibly sent to war in Ukraine.
[Audio clip of DW News report on AI Hungarian election ads]
The video ends with a warning that Brussels could make such a nightmare real…
Morgan Sung: Of course, none of it was real. The candidate behind those ads, the incumbent prime minister, has close ties to Vladimir Putin.
Michal Klincewicz: It’s the same stuff that we would have seen from Russia. So, you know, disinformation campaigns about candidates, scandals, of corruption. Right? Narratives that are meant to like undermine, for example, the effort to put sanctions on Russia. All of these things are amplified with generative AI content so text, images, videos, and so on. And some of these are very effective or effective in that they’re like high quality.
Morgan Sung: So why is slopaganda flooding our feeds? There’s no escape from it. It’s polluting pretty much every political conversation.
But, in the U.S. specifically especially slopaganda from the White House. well, Michal said that it may have something to do with the ties between the US government and big tech companies.
Michal Klincewicz: The long-term consequences of mixing corporate power and governance is very well known and studied around the world. It’s called fascism and a classic Italian Mussolini style fascism. That’s what they built in Italy and they kind of with a few tweaks, re-implemented in Germany. The rise of slopaganda or rise of like AI generated content has political consequences, even independently of that, because I think it gives a lot of power to a few people that can create the message. And it takes power away from the individuals that will be at the voting booth casting a vote. The person that controls the prompt, as we saw like with Grok or something, changes the conversation.
Morgan Sung: Ok, but why can’t we look away from AI slop? What about it is so effective?
We’re going to get into that — after this break. But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going. You can support us by becoming a member at donate.kqed.org/podcasts. Ok, more on slopaganda after the break. Stick around.
We’re back. Let’s open a new tab: Why is slopaganda so effective?
I’ve seen people refer to what’s currently happening between the U.S. And Iran as a meme war, and memes have been very potent vehicles of propaganda and disinformation. There’s a long documented history of memes being weaponized in politics and conflict. What makes this current iteration with slopaganda different?
Michal Klincewicz:It’s generated quickly, the quality is much higher. It’s more persuasive, it’s more complex. It has many layers: an audio one, a visual one, a narrative one, that are done extremely professionally. So all of that has to do with the fact that it’s generated by AI actually. So these tools enable this kind of fast turnaround, high quality stuff to come out.
Morgan Sung: Explosive Media, the digital content studio behind a lot of LEGO slopaganda, started posting animated political videos on YouTube last year. They had an anti-American theme, but didn’t really catch on. A few months ago, right around the first US-Israeli strikes on Iran, Explosive Media began posting LEGO-themed videos. And they blew up.
One of the earlier videos had no dialogue, just intense music. It showed scenes of people who’ve been oppressed by the American government.
Native American riders on horses, dressed in traditional regalia, Japanese villagers gathered in front of a photo of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb, Palestinians in Gaza, West Africans who were chained and subjected to slavery and they’re all LEGOs. They take turns sending missiles to the White House, the Statue of Liberty, and the Titanic?
They gather and cheer, and text appears that says, “One Vengeance For All.” That got some attention, but only went so far. Then Explosive Media added rapping on top of the LEGO videos … and suddenly, they’d cracked the code.
[Audio clip from Explosive Media video]
You said you aint no pedophile, but bitch, you are. Yelling worldwide for the Epstein scar.
Michal Klincewicz: The Iranian videos are using the language of the contemporary dialogue about colonialism, about imperialism about, uh, the Epstein class.
[Audio clips from Explosive Media video]
Sacred defense, we protecting the soil, while you sacrifice soldiers to pay for your spoil.
We see everything, every secret, every dirty Epstein link you hide
Your government is run by pedophiles, they ordered you to die for Israel. They lied to you all.
Michal Klincewicz: All of these things are the kinds of words or the kinds of concepts that we can hear being thrown around by people in the US that comment on current affairs. This is what Iran is doing. They’re not presenting their propaganda or their message using the language of, say, Shia Islam or the Iran-Iraqi war or any of these that really matter to the old guard. Of the Iranian revolution. This stuff is new, it’s fresh, it hit, and it’s kind of capturing our attention here as opposed to the attention of the Iranians there.
Morgan Sung: The LEGO music videos are so effective that it’s inspiring similar ones, from people in other countries, who also feel wronged by the US.
Earlier this month, the US announced additional sanctions on Cuba, which has already been devastated by the American-imposed fuel blockade. Days after that announcement, an X user, based in Havana, posted this video:
[Audio clip of AI video from Cuba]
Escucha el rugido que Baja del Lomerío Aquí no hay miedo ni rastro de escalofrío Pretenden asfixiar la sabia de esta tierra con garras de imperio y tambores de guerra…
Morgan Sung: The translation – listen to the roar descending from the hills. Here, there is no fear, nor a trace of a shiver. They seek to suffocate the sap of this land with claws of empire and war drums.
This video’s got it all. LEGO-fied depictions of Havana’s colorful cityscape, the idyllic Caribbean beaches, the vibrant tobacco farms wrapped up with a patriotic message about defending Cuba from an American invasion and obviously, set to a very catchy beat.
It’s a trend now. Criticizing the US in any way? Do it with LEGO!
The White House has also been posting slopaganda to its various official channels. Though the American version is, well … just listen to this.
[Audio clip from White House Strike video]
Here comes the heat from the USA. And boom! Up and down. What a strike. [cheering]
Morgan Sung: Ok, so that video, again, posted by the White House, starts with an ESPN clip of real life bowling champion Pete Weber preparing for his legendary winning strike. Then it cuts to a bunch of animated bowling pins carrying guns and a sign that says “We won’t stop making nuclear weapons.”
[Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird playing]
Morgan Sung: They’re in a desert. They’re marching. And yes, that is Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird that you’re hearing.
Suddenly, they’re in a bowling alley, getting into formation … and then a bowling ball emblazoned with American stars and stripes comes hurtling toward them.
The pins come tumbling down, and a fighter jet comes flying out of the bowling ball. And as the beat picks up, the video cuts to real footage of American airstrikes on Iran. Fade to black. And then a title card that says “ The White House.” In case you forgot who made the video.
Michal Klincewicz:They’re not really high quality stuff. This is kind of their memes or content for made by, I think, boomers for boomers, essentially. And I think the LEGO videos from Iran are made by millennials for the world. And the White House is using the kind of language and conceptual tools that may have been effective 30 years ago. The messages are kind of mixed. They don’t form a coherent narrative the Iranian stuff on the other hand is very coherent and there is a way in which it’s presenting a narrative from one video to the next.
[Audio clip from Explosive Media video]
The Gulf is our hood, and we holdin’ the key, Get back on your phone, you, get no pass for free! World is askin’ if the gate is open? Yes or nah? I just smile at ’em…”I said Inshallah!”
Michal Klincewicz:It’s almost as if these things were episodes that come out every day.
Morgan Sung: A spokesperson for Explosive Media told Al Jazeera that there are ten people who work on their videos. It’s a Gen Z studio — all of them are between 19 and 25.
Michal Klincewicz: I would speculate a large team of people that know what they’re doing, have a very keen sense of both the media landscape in the United States and in the world, but also of the themes. So I would think this is probably the tip of an iceberg of some kind of a massive media and propaganda operation.
Morgan Sung: The studio claims to be independent, but has admitted that their clientele does include the Iranian state.
Michal Klincewicz:And it shows in how the slopaganda videos are used. They’re used to really undermine the war effort in the United States and to, I think, get Americans and other people around the world on their side.
Morgan Sung: Until recently, a lot of AI generated media has been designed to intentionally dupe people, the deepfaked call of Biden’s voice, telling voters to stay home, the videos of Ukrainian soldiers, appearing to surrender on the front lines.
But the Iranian LEGO videos are so obviously AI slop. No one thinks the LEGO guy in the Little Orange Man video is actually Trump. No one is getting duped into believing that’s really him, dressed in a pirate get up and getting shipwrecked in Iran. So why is this propaganda still so effective?
Michal Klincewicz: Perhaps it’s so effective because it appears not to be real. These are not deep fakes. No one is pretending that this is real, that we know it’s AI generated, that kind of sucks you in. And there’s some kind of uncanniness about it. We’re kind of like, wait, what? And that moment I think is the first hook. There’s probably different videos, different styles of slopaganda for different audiences. That’s also one of its powers, that it’s so easy to make a customized version of the same message for a specific audience.
Morgan Sung : In various interviews, a spokesperson for Explosive Media who goes by “Mr. Explosive” explained some of the team’s processes. He’s talked about how poetry is a pillar of Persian history and culture, so the team writes the rap lyrics themselves. Then, they use AI to Americanize the songs and generate the singing voices. And it’s clear that they have their fingers on the pulse of American pop culture. The Pirates of the Caribbean, for one, is one of Disney’s most successful franchises. It’s something that’s immediately recognizable and familiar to a lot of Americans.
[Audio from Explosive Media video]
Listen … Lost in our fog, you call us the pirates? Man, check the mirror, dawg, you’re the one that’s biased, Vultures on the water, fiending for the black gold, Straight freeloaders, doing what you’re told!
Michal Klincewicz:All of these references are the sorts of things you may hear from more progressive liberal parts of our country about the problems of say, you know, wealth inequality or abuse of power, corruption by the Trump administration. This is where this stuff is coming from. So they’re kind of using the message that actually would resonate with people that are already in some ways uncomfortable.
Morgan Sung: Like, this video, which is an outlier for Explosive Media. Instead of a story about LEGO pirate Trump bumbling his way through the strait of Hormuz, this one starts with an overhead shot of Tehran. A LEGO version, of course. A LEGO figurine smiles at the audience and holds out his arms to the viewer, like he’s welcoming us in for a hug.
[Audio from Explosive Media video]
We do not hate you, people of the West. We have watched from across the ocean, from behind their walls, and what we see is a people who deserve better than what rules them.
Morgan Sung: The video lays out all these grievances with the American government and mainstream media. These are sentiments that resonate with a lot of Americans: concerns over rising costs, opposition to another war, feeling disempowered by the current political system.
[Audio from Explosive Media video]
The billionaire who funds the law then writes the law himself, the pharmaceutical machine that keeps you sick for profit and wealth. The school that teaches history with chapters torn away. So you never ask the question, who made it this way?
Morgan Sung: The previous videos from Explosive Media have always attacked Trump or members of his cabinet. And for the most part, left the American people out of it. This video directly addresses Americans. Instead of taking personal shots at specific leaders, it’s a critique of the systemic failures of American society at large. It’s almost a show of solidarity.
[Audio from Explosive Media video]
We are not your enemies. We’re prisoners of the same cause. We love Americans.
Morgan Sung: It’s convincing. It’s supposed to be. This is the kind of emotional appeal that makes propaganda especially effective.
Michal Klincewicz:I mean, emotions are the first thing that we may have when we see a message. And if they’re negative emotions, in particular things like fear or anxiety or resentment, whatever it is that we experience or we believe while we have these emotional states, we’re more likely to remember. There’s a lot of research about this and the negativity bias in memory is pretty prominent and once it’s in there, it doesn’t get out. So you form that negative association with a politician or some kind of a celebrity, it’s gonna be very hard for you to get rid of it moving forward.
Morgan Sung: When there’s so much noise, it’s hard to pick out what’s real and what’s not. There’s only so much information that a human being can consume and process every day.
What breaks through the noise and captures our attention tends to be content that’s emotionally alarming. It triggers our brain’s emotional center before we can process that information rationally. And studies have shown that people remember negative information better … which can ultimately influence our beliefs and reasoning.
Between a dry news article and a catchy LEGO video — which one are you going to remember next week? Next month? Next election cycle? It’s important to note that these videos are a very effective distraction.
Michal Klincewicz: All that stuff is distracting us from the nature of the Iranian regime that literally in January, machine gunned like tens of thousands of its own people.
Morgan Sung: At the end of last year, amid Iran’s worsening economic crisis, shop keepers and university students took to the streets in protest of the country’s Islamic leadership. A week later, demonstrations erupted across the country, calling for an end to the religious government, and demanding a secular democracy.
Morgan Sung: Iranian authorities crushed the protests with brutal force.
[Audio from Tehran eyewitness protest footage]
They’re shooting us! They’re shooting us! This government is shooting people.
Morgan Sung: Human rights groups say more than 7,000 people were killed during the protests, with tens of thousands more still unaccounted for.Doctors in Iran estimate that the death toll could be over 30,000.
Two things can be true. The LEGO slopaganda videos coming out of Iran make points about the US that a lot of Americans might agree with about its leadership, and how it’s failing its own people while also taking the spotlight off of Iran’s own government.
Even if you know that the LEGO videos are fake and AI, if they’re hijacking your attention, drowning out other content online then the slopaganda is doing what it’s supposed to.
Michal Klincewicz:That changes how we consume information, whether we care about truth at all. And that’s very bad for a democracy, actually, if you have a bunch of people that don’t care about what is true and are used to not taking what people say seriously.
Morgan Sung: So what happens when LEGO rap overshadows actual news? When we can’t look away from an AI generated diss track? When a whole population can be so easily distracted?
Slopaggedon. Michal and his co-authors call it the slopaganda shit storm. For our next tab, we’ll go with my favorite: slopagandapocalypse.
Let’s open one more tab: How to survive the slopagandapocalypse
Michal said it’s not really a question of stopping the slopaganda doomsday scenario — we’re already living it. And slopaganda is, relatively speaking, so new. We’re in uncharted waters here, and we don’t have solid research on the effects that slopaganda will have on society and democracy down the road. But Michal has a few hunches.
Michal Klincewicz: One real possible consequence of this is that slopaganda is going to be here for, to stay And it will be a tool in the toolbox of every authoritarian regime in the world, just as like batons and riot police have been.
So will this be, uh, it will just be AI generated, slop is gonna be yet another way to bamboozle, distract people around the world.
Morgan Sung: Slopaganda has already wormed its way into LA’s mayoral race, with former reality TV star and current candidate Spencer Pratt reposting AI-generated videos of his opponent. Like this Star Wars-themed one, where incumbent LA mayor Karen Bass, portrayed as Darth Vader, schemes with California Governor Gavin Newsom, who’s deepfaked as Emperor Palpatine.
[Audio clip of AI-generated video]
You didn’t finish burning the city to the ground in the first term.
Make sure you finish the job in your second term.
The only thing that can stop us is someone telling the truth.
As long as they don’t have any hope, the city is ours.
Morgan Sung: Spencer Pratt appears, depicted as a Jedi, and battles Darth Karen above the Hollywood sign.
[lightsaber sounds]
Morgan Sung: This is peak slopaganda.
You could argue that AI tools have, in some way, democratized the creation of propaganda. Anyone with access to a video generator and a taste for pop culture has the potential to make their message go viral.
Slopaganda itself, and the AI tools used to create it, are morally neutral. Michal joked about how we could have more slopaganda about recycling, or being nice to each other. But instead, we’re increasingly seeing political candidates and government institutions use it to undermine opponents and steer the narrative.
Michal Klincewicz:I think it’s going to give a lot of power to people that have a lot of money to do this, that will be able to basically create the world in their own image. The second consequence of this, and I think this is maybe optimistic, is that people are going to turn away from the internet. I think that there’s a way in which AI content is kind of really taking over all the spaces on the internet that people cared about. And I think at some point you’re just gonna say, you know what, yeah, I have better things to do in my time.
Morgan Sung: Are there any feasible interventions to stopping the slopageddon?
Michal Klincewicz:If you were to look a little bit more to Europe, I think there’s some ideas about what this could look like. There’s the Digital Services Act, which is connected to the European Commission, and the AI Act. These are legal instruments meant to police basically Facebook and X and so on from stealing European citizens’ data. The tech companies hate them because they have real bite.
Morgan Sung: Unfortunately, Michal doesn’t see that happening in the U.S.
Michal Klincewicz: I don’t think there’s gonna be any meaningful institutional interventions from the United States anytime soon
Morgan Sung: California, for one, has tried to crack down. Back in 2024, Governor Newsom signed a series of laws that required more disclosure and transparency around political deepfakes, and required social media companies to remove the “deceptive” content before an election. Here’s the twist: Slopaganda might actually be protected by the First Amendment — it could be considered satire or political speech. Long story short, Elon Musk sued the state, and now my X feed is full of AI Spencer Pratt doing deepfake Return of the Jedi.
[Lightsaber sounds]
Morgan Sung: Zooming out, back to the war between the US and Iran, it’s clear that the White House slopaganda, reactive, disjointed, made to appeal to Boomers, is failing to reach a lot of its own citizens.
Michal Klincewicz: I don’t think it’s working. I think it’s kind of cringey and, and clunky stuff but I think maybe they’re portraying themselves as, as you know, winning the war.
Morgan Sung: So, without institutional change, what can individual people do to be a little more resilient to slopaganda? Not just in this war, but in any political setting?
Michal Klincewicz: Slopaganda, again, is neither good nor bad on its own, right? Just remember who is sending this stuff and why. Educate yourself a little bit about the larger context of what’s happening. There’s a history there, There are motivations that are hidden behind the cute videos that we may not know about.
Morgan Sung: We need to remember why we’re watching this content in the first place, and interrogate its purpose. What kind of reaction is it eliciting? What is it distracting you from? How did it come across your feed in the first place?
And if you get overwhelmed, well, Michal has one temporary solution. Log off! Touch grass! The slop is never ending but you can still give your brain a break from consuming it.
Michal Klincewicz: I think we need more love in our life. I mean, seriously, just get away from the internet a little bit from social media and just kind of start, um, hanging out. With each other more, and then this stuff just doesn’t matter.
Morgan Sung: And with that, let’s close all these tabs.
Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung.
This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music.
The Close All Tabs team also includes editor Chris Hambrick and audio engineer Brendan Willard. Additional music by APM.
Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is our Director of Podcasts, and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.
Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.
This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran, and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches.
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Thanks for listening!
Michal Klincewicz: I think there just aren’t enough professionals there anymore. Maybe they got rid of them with Project 2025. I don’t know. Maybe there is no more media wing of the White House.
Morgan Sung: The DOGE cuts hit deep.
Michal Klincewicz: The DOGE cuts. That’s why this stuff is clunky and sucks. These memes are not dank!
