LONDON –When 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 minuteon the social-media platform X (formerly Twitter).
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-monopoly 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 four.
Fortunately, after years of inaction, reagulators 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 ($140 million) under the Digital Services Act (DSA). While this hardly makes a dent in Musk’s vast fortune, the fine is not the point. More important is what the EU 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. US President Donald Trump’s new National Security Strategy 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.
Despite the predictable protests from Musk and Trump, the EU’s regulatory actions have nothing to do with attacking “free speech.” (The fine targeted economic scams; the probe targets child abuse.) Instead, these measures mark the start of what is likely to become a bitter struggle to rein in X and, more broadly, to curb the spread of AI-driven slop. What Musk and Trump portray as a fight over who has the right to speak is really a fight over who has the power to force others to listen.
The conflict raises stark questions for policymakers. What will Europe do once X inevitably refuses to comply? Will the European Commission impose stiffer penalties or suspend the company’s access to the single market? Child sexual abuse material is illegal; yet X’s leadership has allowed it to be generated and spread. And why, for that matter, are European leaders still active onX at all, given that Musk has already signaled his defiance by blocking the EU’s advertising account on the platform?
The EU’s first, limited enforcement action against X has already caused Trump to retaliate. In late December, the administration barred five Europeans, including Thierry Breton, the bloc’s former internal market commissioner, from entering the US, citing Europe’s “egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.” More will follow. Even so, European leaders should stay the course.
Brazil offers a useful precedent. In 2024, after Musk defied a court order to suspend certain X accounts, the Brazilian judiciary shut down the platform nationwide and moved to seize Musk’s assets. Musk soon folded. Although he tried to portray the court as an enemy of free speech, accusing the judges of censoring conservative voices, it was an appropriate response to a company that has flouted the law and attacked democratic institutions. This was a show of strength the EU would do well to emulate.
It’s important to remember that Europe has faced information warfare before. During World War II, Nazi Germany broadcast propaganda into European and British living rooms in flawless English. “Lord Haw-Haw,” as one broadcaster was dubbed, used radio to sap Allied morale until his capture in 1945. Eighty years later, unfettered by geography or spectrum limits, Musk and Zuckerberg are dripping micro-targeted poison into billions of personalized feeds.
Even those who scoff at disinformation can see how the slopification of public discourse has made truth almost impossible for ordinary citizens to discern. Regulated media are no firewall, as authoritarians increasingly exploit such outlets to steer people toward unregulated platforms hosting more extreme messages. In the United Kingdom, for example, the hard-right channel GB News recently used YouTube to broadcast a call for the removal of non-white members of Parliament – content it could not lawfully air on television.
Taken together, these developments herald a widening conflict over Europe’s information space. While tech moguls like Musk will cry censorship, this should be dismissed as the bad-faith claim it is. Others will frame it as a civilizational clash between Europeans and Americans. That, too, is wrong. Many Americans are fighting to defend their democracy and their children from slop, too, and Europe can play an important role in resisting the same authoritarian tech.
Contrary to what authoritarians like Trump may claim, this is a battle pitting parents, honest merchants, and citizens who value freedom against the plutocrats, slop pornographers, pension scammers, crypto-bribers, and would-be dictators who happily subvert democratic institutions for power and profit. Trump and his tech allies have shown us which side they are on and the world they want. It is up to us to stop them.
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Cori Crider is Executive Director of the Future of Technology Institute.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2026.
www.project-syndicate.org