Twitter’s 2022 revenue sharing program for blue/verified accounts has predictably opened the floodgates of slop for the purpose of boosting engagement and hence ad revenue. Slop differs from your typical spam, e.g. casinos or pills, in that it’s marketed under the pretext of being insightful or new, when it’s either stale and or clickbait. The objective is to get people to click out of curiosity and to elicit predictable outrage as it’s shared and retweeted. Because it’s less obvious than spam, it’s harder to ignore or filter, but every bit as annoying when you see it.
A useful litmus test is, “If there was no monetization, would there be any reason to post this?” An example is the August 20th tweet post by the news-aggregation account @unusual_whales:
Young adults' personalities are changing, with conscientiousness in freefall, per FT: pic.twitter.com/3Ey5vScdNp
— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) August 20, 2025
The account @unusual_whales originally began as a crypto subscription service, and then pivoted to posting slop of all flavors to take advantage of revenue sharing.
He links to his website, which features an AI-generated summary of the Understanding America Study, a report by the University of Southern California (USC) that surveyed young people on the Big Five personality traits and compared the findings with past surveys. The results were first published on Aug 8, 2025 by the Financial Times under the headline “The troubling decline in conscientiousness”:
Digging deeper into the data, which comes from the Understanding America Study, we can see that people in their twenties and thirties in particular report feeling increasingly easily distracted and careless, less tenacious and less likely to make and deliver on commitments.
The premise of the study is dubious at best. Personality traits are inherently subjective. Something like weight or height can be measured precisely and are objective, but methodologically, how does one map self-reported surveys of conscientiousness today, to the past? Moreover, the data only goes as far back as 2014 and it’s possible this trend, when put in broader historical context, is cyclical rather the secular.
Also, as I argued last week, when it comes to good-paying jobs and top schools, acceptance and hiring rates have plunged. Even low-paying jobs have tons of screening. Highly qualified applicants routinely get declined even after applying many times, failing to secure a callback, let alone a job. This would suggest more conscientiousness is required to succeed, not less. It’s hard for me, at least, to square this data with what I and others have observed in ‘real life’.
Additionally, @unusual_whales is recycling stale content that first went viral on August 8th, when it was reported by the Financial Times. Here’s a tweet from the 8th that originally mentioned the study:
Conscientiousness is the biggest predictor of life success.
Conscientiousness falling means every new generation will be less successful than the last. Unless it reflects a broader societal change – which would mean the whole society now values conscientiousness less. https://t.co/JOrMwJjPbm pic.twitter.com/tS2lvPq3x2
— Petr Švec (@realPetrSvec) August 8, 2025
If you click the above tweet, can see a broken link that begins with “https://x.com/mattyglesias/…” Presumably it was first posted by @mattyglesias. When called out by his followers for posting bullshit, he deleted it, hence the “this post is unavailable” message, but not before it went viral anyway.
Now this study, being a reliable piece of engagement bait, can be filed away with the other ‘greatest hits’ to be periodically reposted when in need of impressions to meet the monthly Twitter payout threshold. Reposting old content is effective because only a small fraction of one’s followers see any given tweet, so most users won’t perceive it as stale unless they’ve already come across it elsewhere. The evidence of reusing content can also be hidden by deleting the tweet, after booking the revenue of course.
Also, the thing about slop is how it can even fool ‘reputable’ people who ought to know better, including academics. Just as regular people fall for AI slop in the context of life-like images or videos, ‘smart’ people can fall for seductive but wrong narratives. Although given the ‘replication crisis‘, this should not be a surprise either. On social media, this means uncritically endorsing such flimsy research if it confirms the preexisting biases or beliefs (e.g ‘that young people are lazy’) of whoever shares it.
Slop thrives because we’re sorta living in a post-truth era, where reality has given way to vibes or sentiment. No one really know what is true or not. So slop helps fill in the details of the collective amnesia. It’s like “I don’t know if this is real, but it would make sense if it were, so it’s real.” The social critics of the ’80s and ’90s feared people would amuse themselves to death, but at least in the past entertainment and advertising had definite boundaries. Slop might be closer to propaganda, but even that is self-contained within its medium, like a film or television show, which has a clear beginning and end.
But slop is more amorphous, being that it hijacks our ability to make sense of the transition of where fact or fiction lies. This is even seen on podcasts, where the host transitions from talking about some historical event, and then somehow insidiously segues to WordPress hosting or VPNs, and you’re left momentarily confused until coming to your senses and realizing it’s an ad.