Facebook Flooded With Agitslop Of AI Grief Farming About Charlie Kirk

Last year, there was some talk about how AI-generated wacky images-summed up generally as shrimp Jesus" as an example of one of the most bizarre-were taking over Facebook. It was only a matter of time until this sort of AI slop nonsense went political in some form or another.

Starting last Friday, people began to report that Facebook was being overwhelmed with obviously fake reports of famous or semi-famous people making some sort of heartfelt" announcement regarding the death of Charlie Kirk. The phenomenon represents a perfect storm: a politically divisive event, genuine public emotion, and AI content generation tools all converging into what can only be described as profitable grief porn. Here are a bunch I've collected:

These are just the few that people posted in response to my and Seth Cotlar's (linked above) threads on Bluesky about this.

What's particularly insidious about this phenomenon is how it represents the natural evolution of engagement farming. These aren't random trolls-they're likely monetized operations taking advantage of Facebook's ad revenue sharing or affiliate marketing programs. Grief and outrage drive engagement, engagement drives ad revenue, and AI tools have made it trivially easy to manufacture both at scale.

The engagement farmers profit. Meta profits. It's just the public that loses out.

The template is depressingly simple: take a polarizing figure's death, generate fake statements from celebrities that will appeal to different political tribes, slap together some AI-generated images, and watch the shares roll in. Each fake post becomes a little cash machine, harvesting clicks from people who want to believe their favorite celebrity shares their political views.

This is engagement hacking" taken to its logical extreme-using AI to manufacture the emotional responses that social media algorithms reward most handsomely.

Gosh, it sure would be nice if Facebook hadn't decided to seriously dial back its content moderation and fact-checking efforts, huh? Facebook gets flooded with obviously fake political content about a highly politicized event. It's almost like having systems to identify and label false information might actually serve a purpose beyond alleged political censorship.

Lead Stories, one of the leading fact-checking orgs that Mark Zuckerberg fired earlier this year, has been keeping busy debunking a bunch of these, but the organization admits that there are too many to cover, and it's mostly targeting the most viral ones."

Eliot Higgins, from Bellingcat, indicated that Russian troll farms were a bit slow to react to the Kirk shooting, but after a couple of days, they went all in, though it sounds like a different kind of campaign than the one people said was flooding Facebook.

This uncertainty points to one of the most challenging aspects of the current information environment: the complete inability to distinguish between foreign influence operations and domestic monetization schemes. When the methods, tools, and even content are essentially identical, attribution becomes nearly impossible from the outside.

The Russian campaigns Higgins describes appear to be more sophisticated influence operations aimed at sowing discord. But the Facebook flood looks more like the work of random opportunistic entrepreneurs who've discovered that fake celebrity grief statements are a reliable way to generate ad revenue. The end result-massive amounts of false information flooding the information ecosystem-is the same regardless of motivation.

This convergence of foreign influence tactics and domestic profit motives creates a kind of disinformation perfect storm. Bad actors don't need to coordinate; they just need to follow the same incentive structures that reward viral misinformation.

I've seen a few people online refer to it as agitslop," which is a fun portmanteau of agitprop and AI slop. The term perfectly captures how political propaganda has merged with algorithmic content farming-it's agitation optimized for engagement rather than ideology, slop designed to trigger shares rather than change minds.

I have no idea if anyone is actually believing any of this, though it does blend in with real stories like Coldplay's Chris Martin actually doing something along those lines (though in more limited fashion).

But it should serve as another reminder that the information ecosystem is full of garbage and nonsense, and everyone needs to be skeptical about what they believe-especially when it confirms what we want to hear about celebrities sharing our political views.