EUROPE'S SLOP WAR

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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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 minute on 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 ownerElon 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 $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 bluecheck system, tackle ad fraud, and restore researcher access so the public can understand the platform's effects on the information landscape.