The violent federal occupation of Minneapolis — and the subsequent killings of two residents at the hands of immigration agents — began with a vlog. Nick Shirley, a roving 23-year-old with a smartphone and a taste for outrage, made a YouTube video with unfounded allegations of fraud at daycares operated by the local Somali American community. Like so much partisan media in history, he was trying to rile up the right-wing base. But he was also playing to another audience: the algorithm.
When I wrote about Shirley in early January, I described him as an influencer — a catch-all term that could be applied to a wide range of people, anyone from Joe Rogan to a 20-something woman sharing Shein hauls on TikTok. Shirley exhibits many shared behaviors: He has a following with parasocial tendencies. His style and sensibilities are finely tuned to what will play well online. He hawks merch at every turn. His literal influence reaches into the highest offices of the US government (Vice President JD Vance has sung his praises). But Shirley and his ilk are not just content creators with a right-wing twist — they’re algo hounds. And he was not just making plain old propaganda; he was making internet slop.
We mostly talk about it in the context of AI-generated material, but slop does not need to be synthetic — AI slop is just a subgenre of a larger type of content that is made quickly and cheaply and poorly. The same lukewarm financial advice peddled by thousands of literal talking heads on Instagram Reels is slop. Falsehoods and oversimplifications about breaking news or contentious celebrity drama that snowball to millions of views is slop. Engagement bait is slop. The president’s social media posts are slop. The main function of slop is to take something from you: your time, your attention, your trust. It is passive in that it requires nothing from viewers but to sit back and consume it. Slop is boring, repetitive, and often inexpensive to make — the natural evolution of an internet built for scale and ruthless optimization. Before his pivot to conservative politics, Shirley was making slop for babies: YouTube videos with titles like “16 YEAR OLD FLIES TO NEW YORK WITHOUT TELLING PARENTS” and “Giving My Teachers $1,000 for Christmas! *emotional*”
A few years ago, Shirley seems to have discovered that what the algorithm actually rewards is inflammatory political content. His views swelled as he hammered on Donald Trump and MAGA talking points around immigration, drugs, and the 2024 presidential election. But even in his newfound political lane, the slop tendencies remained. At least four video titles follow the format of “[City] Has Fallen…” and Shirley and others like him revisit the same topics over and over: They go to Canal Street in New York City, to Kensington in Philadelphia, to demonstrations trying to make liberal protesters and passersby look foolish. Many people making content like this call themselves “independent journalists” and call the content they produce “reporting.”
Partisan media and shoddy reporting have a long history in the US, but one parallel stands out: the era of the so-called yellow press, which got its name from a cartoon strip published in papers featuring a child in a yellow shirt.
“It was a moment before professional news values had really set in, before there were professional codes of ethics,” says Lucas Graves, distinguished researcher at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid and a professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The biggest newspapers, like the New York World and New York Journal, would run serious, reported news stories. But they “would also run stories to try to generate outrage and almost invent scandals in order to sell more newspapers,” Graves says. There’s debate about how much responsibility yellow journalism carries in the outbreak of the Spanish–American War of 1898 — but, like the contemporary slopagandists and the Trump administration, the press coverage and government actions were in sync. The government wanted public outrage directed at Spain and to expand its empire; the yellow press wanted to sell newspapers.
“There’s an alignment between the creator’s interest in generating outrage and gaining audience or getting clicks, and the government’s interest in helping to drive public support for whatever its desired policy is,” Graves says. “And that’s when a partisan press becomes really dangerous.”
The difference is that modern slopagandists have an unprecedented amount of data about how their content is performing and what their audiences want. Traditional media outlets of the 20th century had only crude signals — newspaper circulation figures, Nielsen ratings — and journalists therefore imagined what their audiences wanted to read. Digitally savvy content creators do not need to guess; they have instant, granular data about what their viewers watch, what titles and topics get them to click, and when they drop off, and endless comments to gauge how people feel about a new video. Many modern newsrooms use audience metrics to guide coverage, but feeding viewers only what makes the numbers go up isn’t journalism. It’s news slop.
You either die an outsider or live long enough to see yourself become the mainstream
“Independent journalists” like Shirley get to have it both ways: They are the media now, to borrow a line from Elon Musk, but they also get to rail against the MSM, to tell their viewers that journalism is dead. Though his claims were unfounded and his evidence sloppy, Shirley’s viral fraud video achieved something that many reporters dream of: immediate impact. It’s almost unheard of that a single story results in an instantaneous response from multiple federal agencies. There is also a deep irony in framing oneself as counterculture or alternative when your work aligns neatly with those in power. When was the last time a vice president uplifted a 23-year-old’s vlog as “more useful” than Pulitzer winners? Shirley’s audience includes Vance, FBI Director Kash Patel, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Lisa Demuth, a Republican running for governor in Minnesota, who reportedly provided Shirley with information that was used in his fraud video. You either die an outsider or live long enough to see yourself become the mainstream.
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