Australia is at risk of being hijacked by Americanised, AI-created digital political trickery called “slopaganda”, designed to fool you and make you angry. If you use social media, you have almost certainly been targeted by it.
We used to think that the risk of AI was from deepfakes — AI altered or created images, video or audio intended to trick you into believing a fake was is real. However, over the past 12 months there is more and more evidence that the real danger is from “slop propaganda” — AI created content that does not hide its artificial origins but aims to amplify misinformation and undermine trust.
The problem of slopaganda is not bad politicians, broken media or foreign content farms. The real problem of slopaganda is that it shows just how broken our economic system has become: the Big Tech conglomerates that own Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok and Youtube operate as attention and profit-extraction platforms that channels legitimate anger away from the economic elites and towards culture-war scapegoats. Slopaganda is the result.
But what is slopagada and is it actually a real problem?
Rather than realistic deepfakes, we are increasingly seeing inexpensive, rapidly produced, and obviously artificial images: candidates reimagined as superheroes, saints, cartoon villains, or other exaggerated characters. The purpose of this content appears less to deceive, and more to entertain, to attack, and to reinforce political identities. (Source, PDF)
Research shows that almost 80 percent of AI political images are deliberately unrealistic, created for fast emotional reactions.
Slopaganda works by combining three media formats into one weapon: political ads, viral memes, and exaggerated political satire. This combination is designed to bypass your logical mind and trigger an instant gut reaction before you have time to really think about the content you have seen or heard. The goal is not to convince you that a fake AI-created image or video is real, but to make you feel a specific way — generally angry and outraged — about political topics.
In Australia, anonymous Facebook pages are targeting us with AI-created disinformation. For example, “a page called 365 Daily News began posting about Australian politics” in August 2026 — the page and others sharing similar fake AI content, are based in Vietnam and Indonesia. These accounts and pages target Labor, Liberal, Greens and One Nation. Their motivation, unlike AI-campaigns created by political organisations, is to manipulate the ad revenue-sharing of platforms like Facebook.
While it can be easy to focus blame on these overseas content farms, the reality is that they are low-wage, self-exploiting digital sweatshops who are trying to earn a few dollars from the billion-dollar social media companies. The real beneficiary of the AI slopaganda content farms is Facebook and Tiktok, and their Silicon Valley billionaire owners.
In the US, there is a large and increasing number of “faceless”, uncontactable Facebook pages and Instagram accounts that routinely generate AI images depicting political figures like Donald Trump as hyper-muscular action heroes or supported by large numbers of non-existent crowds.
Increasingly, these tactics are being adopted by official political campaigns themselves, for example below the screenshots from 2024 Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers. And Trump famously shared the AI-created “poop-jet” video dumping fake shit on fake protestors from a fake jet plane.
These cheap visual tricks sell an illusion of strength and toughness to distract from a lack of real policy solutions or positive vision.
Political campaigns like Trump’s create and share outrageous AI slop because standard political messaging is stale and boring. AI-generated content is low-cost to create, fast and can be shocking and sensational, specifically to cut through the noise and hijack public attention in a crowded online environment.
Slopaganda isn’t just an election problem.
When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, mega-churches and Kirk’s own Turning Point US organisation used AI to create fake videos of Kirk in heaven alongside Jesus and biblical martyrs like Paul and Peter, with AI-faked Kirk voice commanding supporters to double down on political conflict. Eventually, cryptocurrency scammers used AI-generated Charlie Kirk to promote the Kirkinator-memecoin in order to monetise Kirk’s death — the same low-level profiteering as the Vietnamese content farmers pushing out fake, AI-generated protest videos.
The “dark patterns” of social media platforms lock users inside algorithmic echo chambers. The profit-focused automated algorithms filter content to match pre-existing biases that keeps you addicted to the platform. This means once you click on one outrage post, the algorithm will start to feed you an endless loop of divisive slopaganda.
Political operatives and foreign-based content farms flood platforms like Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp with cheap AI content to stir up anger around national identity and culture wars to keep voters permanently riled up. For the foreign-based content farms, the motivation is money: the revenue-sharing deals from Facebook ads mean that content scammers can monetise anger from American or Australian (or UK, Canadian, etc) audiences.
Constant exposure to campaign slop worsens polarisation and deepens emotions associated with anger, dislike, distrust and hostility towards the opposing political side. Political differences are turned by AI fake content into deep personal hostility between everyday people. Over the past decade, political debate has become even more of an algorithm-fuelled “blood sport”. The Big Tech algorithms aggressively reinforce feelings of hatred toward your neighbours, workmates, and family members.
Standard fixes like AI content labels, watermarks or bans have and will fail because slopaganda is intentionally and obviously fake and, in many places like the US, treated as political satire. 2026 research from the US shows most voters (73 percent) think it is “unacceptable” to use AI to “generate the images or video in an ad”, even if there is a notice that AI was used. Mere disclosure therefore is not the solution, obviously.
When far-right content creators and politicians use cheap AI cartoons to try to push your buttons, they think they can manipulate you into ignoring the fact that wages are going backward while corporate profits go up. If these groups and the social media platforms really respected you, they would focus on telling you what they are going to do about the real issues, like the cost-of-living and fuel. Real common sense means refusing to let offshore algorithms and political operatives tell us who to hate.
We need to ask: who benefits make you angry and hostile?
Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Tiktok have every financial incentive to profit from your outrage and grievance. They have designed their apps and websites to maximise the amount of time you spend using them, in order to sell your attention to advertisers.
And the AI-created political noise and gladiatorial distraction induces fatalism — the idea that economic change is impossible — which enforces the status quo of austerity, cuts to public services, corporate profiteering and so on.
The corporate platforms want us yelling at each other and liking fake AI-created videos of fake protests so we don’t notice our wages are going down, our energy bills are getting higher, public services are struggling, and corporations profits are the highest they’ve ever been.
While you are being induced by AI-slop creators to hate migrants, trans people and Muslims, the economy is being restructured to extract ever-larger profits from you to the corporations, the finance sector and the billionaires.
Further, we need to recognise that just because political campaigns are creating AI slop to fool you, doesn’t mean there is no rationale behind why people are angry.
Decades of neoliberalism and privatisation in Australia — casualised and contracted-out jobs, deindustrialisation, the housing crisis, and gutted services, the cost-of-living — have stripped everyday people of the institutional power we used to have. Slopaganda is effective — in that it provokes feelings of anger and animosity — because everyday workers feel genuine anger toward an out-of-touch political class that primarily serves the interests of billionaires and transnational corporations.
Whether we realise it or not, there are corporations and political organisations trying to influence and manipulate you for their own profit. We need a fundamental change in how we, in Australia, respond to and accept how AI is being forced on our society.