#135: AI Slop
Overwhelming online spaces
Hello again.
You are reading Understanding TikTok. My name is Marcus. “Nothing has actually changed - and yet everything has.” German writer Kurt Tucholsky is talking about the sudden rush of autumn here. Yet the 100 year old sentence perfectly sums up my last weeks on TikTok witnessing Hurricane Milton, an avalanche of AI generated slop, dancing soldiers in Ukraine and Israel and sounds, oh so many sounds by far right actors in Germany. Here are a couple of observations and projects.
📕 AI-Propaganda: Ragebait, Slop, and Synthetic Disinformation
📗 Participatory Propaganda: Actively involve Fans and Allies
📘 Data delivered by the TikTok API were false
📙 What else
📕 AI-Propaganda: Ragebait, Slop, and Synthetic Disinformation
We are living in a time where actual photos taken in real life by real people on real cameras look and feel like having been AI generated. Baudrillard would have loved it. It may come to you as a cutesy autumn vibe or freaky rescue fantasy or as new propaganda form. The thing is: people care less and less if photos represent anything that has actually happened IRL.
"I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter." wrote Amy Kremer, a Republican National Committee member representing Georgia, on X after an image’s synthetic provenance was revealed (NPR).
“This is the ‘fuck it’ era of AI slop and of political messaging, where AI-generated images are used to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment regardless of truth. For all of the fearmongering about the potential of deepfake-driven disinformation, we have seen time and time again that whatever message is being delivered doesn’t need to be supported with real—or even realistic—photos or videos to convey it” writes Jason Koebler for 404 Media.
“I thought this would be a bigger event in the history of images than the invention of perspective in the 15th Century. I still think that's true” tweets Trevor Paglan. He has written and worked on computer vision and AI for ages.
And i would love to hear his thoughts on AI Slop – low-quality, poorly generated content using generative artificial intelligence tools, often without proper oversight or refinement being used by e.g. Donald Trump (AP) – the Slop Candidate (Atlantic) – , Elon Musk (Independent), political campaigners in India (DW), politicians in Indonesia (CfR) and the German right-wing party AfD (Frankfurter Rundschau).
I am currently collecting data and use cases for a paper on multimodal AI-generated propaganda on TikTok and other as a part of my ongoing investigation of postdigital propaganda (#130).
📗 Participatory Propaganda: actively involve fans and allies
A couple of weeks ago i wrote an analysis of the European election campaigns of selected parties on TikTok for Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. One of the core results was that the politicians' sometimes great commitment did not always pay off in terms of high reach. The AfD, which had outsourced the distribution of content to fans and followers, achieved significantly higher interaction rates with fewer videos.
Strategists of the party outsourced the dissemination of content and coordinated it in a public telegram group called “TikTok Guerilla” (Correctiv). With that they basically mimicked Russian propaganda strategies applied after the invasion of Ukraine (Vice /Media Matters). Instead of paying influencers they gave away iphones in a raffle.
From now on, the goal of democratic parties should be to actively involve fans and allies in the dissemination of convincing communication. The concept of participatory propaganda as the deliberate and systematic attempt to shape perceptions and direct behaviour of a target audience while seeking to co-opt its members to actively engage in the spread of persuasive communications (Wanless and Berk 2021) should be studied and applied.
The winter semester has just started. In the coming weeks i teach two courses at TH Köln – University of Applied Sciences on “Political communication on TikTok” and “TikTok Tactics – German Federal Election 2025” where we will further investigate successful strategies for political campaigning. And i hope to share some insights on “Memes as Modern Soft-Propaganda-Tools” at Europe’s first Political Tech Summit that takes place on January 25 in Berlin.
📘 Data delivered by the TikTok API were false
Last week i was part of a data sprint with great colleagues from UvA Amsterdam. We set up TikTok persona accounts on cleared smartphones, trained them on different topics and later scraped their feeds using the tool Zeeschuimer on a web browser.
While i have been hesitant using TikTok’ research API due to the documented shortcomings (The Research API falls woefully short) this field report has confirmed my apprehensions: Lessons from TikTok's API Issues During the 2024 European Elections. Quote: Basically, viewing and sharing metrics of data delivered by the TikTok API were false for several months and that just before the 2024 European Elections.
Once again i want to point to the TikTok Tools List and ask for help. If you know of another tool to investigate TikTok, please feel free to add it to the list. Thanks to the colleagues who helped built the list.
📙 What else
🍏 Reading latent values and priorities in TikTok's community guidelines for children International Journal of Cultural Studies
🍏 I Took A TikTok Class. What Happened Next Blew My Mind
Defector
🍏 TikTok wants to turn millions of Americans into paid shopping influencers
Rest of world
🍏 The Social-Media Influencers Reshaping How Young Americans Get Their Political News WSJ
🍏 ByteDance lays off hundreds of TikTok employees in shift to AI content moderation Techcrunch
🍏 Right-wing populist communication of the party AfD on TikTok: To what extend does the AfD use TikTok as part of its communication to win over young voters? The Dynamics of Digital Influence
And now let me point you to video artist Jordan Stone (TikTok) who is doing wholesome stuff that feels like some sort of polished, personal version of post-corecore. Here is an interview.
I will be in Sheffield in a couple of days at the Association of Internet Researchers Conference 2024 presenting Tom Divon’s and my research on thirst trap propaganda on a fantastic panel called “Ambient Amplification: Attention Hijacking and Social Media Propaganda”, Friday, Nov 1, 3:30pm, SU Gallery Room 2. If you are around please come by and say “Hi”. Ciao ciao
I love Jordan Stone!!
See ya in Berlin on the 25th of Jan. 👋🏻