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The silence of the ‘Shinnerbots’: How social media lost political credibility

So-called ‘slop’ is driving people and advertisers from social media. But platforms are also throttling political content

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter and rebranded it as X the platform’s moderation tools have become nearly non-existent, with researchers finding increasing trends of harassment and disinformation. Photograph: Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
Since Elon Musk bought Twitter and rebranded it as X the platform’s moderation tools have become nearly non-existent, with researchers finding increasing trends of harassment and disinformation. Photograph: Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
Liz Carolan
Sat Oct 19 2024 - 07:02

When a political scandal breaks in Ireland, a fight to own the narrative quickly ensues. We have come to expect at least three public battlegrounds for this skirmish over the story: the Dáil, the airwaves, and increasingly important over the past decade or two, social media. And during the last election campaign in 2020 no one dominated the online space as effectively as Sinn Féin. Networks of online accounts supporting and defending the party earned the moniker “Shinnerbots” for the vehement manner in which they pile into conversations about the party, to the extent that party leaders have had to come out and deny that they either encourage or support this trolling and abuse.

This week, Sinn Féin found itself in an uphill battle to reclaim the narrative. With an election likely just weeks away, the party has had to face the fallout of last week’s resignation from Sinn Féin of Brian Stanley, which comes on the back of a series of child protection scandals involving party members, and questions about how all of this has been handled.

Mary Lou McDonald could be heard defending the party’s actions in a tense interview on RTÉ's Morning Ireland on Monday, and since then she has been fighting for the reputation of her leadership in the Dáil. Yet through all of this the infamous “Shinnerbots” have been eerily quiet. Search X (formerly Twitter) for mention of Brian Stanley, for example, and you will mostly find bland news brand accounts, interspersed with some pretty halfhearted generic – maybe even generated – mudslinging in various directions. Has the platform finally lost so much relevance that piling on doesn’t feel worth the effort?

[ Full transcript of Mary Lou McDonald’s interview: ‘I’m not pretending for a second that mistakes weren’t made’ ]

It has been a long time coming, but this could be the moment that marks the end of an era for social media as we know it. Any illusions we may have once held that social media platforms acted as a barometer of public or even niche community opinion – and a place that was worth trying to manipulate – are dead.

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It is almost two years since Elon Musk took over Twitter, rebranding it as “X” and cutting at least 75 per cent of its workforce. What happened next has been well documented; the platform’s moderation tools have become nearly nonexistent, with researchers finding increasing trends of harassment and disinformation. People are turning away. The Financial Times estimates that in the UK, daily users of the platform decreased by about a third since the Musk takeover, and the percentage of adults posting political content has in most cases halved. Advertisers have fled, leading to the spectacle of Musk, self-styled “free speech absolutist”, suing his company’s advertisers for reducing the amount of money they spend to run ads on the platform.

Another factor is driving the decline in social media’s influence on the political sphere. This relates to a change in how social media platforms reward and compensate accounts that post viral content. TikTok’s “creator fund”, introduced in 2020, gave cash rewards to those overseeing accounts that produce content that reaches a wide audience, something that X and Instagram have also since introduced.

This monetisation of reach has formalised the role of the professional content creator, changing platforms from networks of social contacts to something more akin to personalised micro-broadcast channels. An influencer’s career is built on the ability to keep pace with ever changing trends and algorithms; and political content is out of favour. A Wall St Journal investigation found this week that Facebook, Instagram and Threads are all throttling political content, with political accounts finding their reach down by about 65 per cent. Influencers they spoke to found that mentioning the word “vote” led to a 63 per cent drop in the number of people who saw their post.

Creator programmes also created new incentives to game the system for profit. Cash payouts, on X at least, are not connected to the quality, accuracy or relevance of content in any meaningful sense; they reward content that is able to game the algorithms, which tends to be things that are sensational, emotive, or often just weird. Enter “Slop”, a word that may make anyone who has worked in a pub think of the end-of-night remnants of discarded drinks congealing in a bucket. It is also the neologism for the low-effort, mass produced AI-generated content that is clogging everything online from search engine results to social media feeds.

As trend-chasing influencers and slop come to dominate platforms, any remaining remnants of genuine public discourse is lost, further distancing social media from being a reflection of public sentiment

Slop is often bizarre or outlandish, like the viral “Shrimp Jesus” images that did the rounds on Facebook earlier this year. It can also be emotive, like the synthetic or faked image of a shivering young girl, clutching a puppy in flood waters that circulated during the Florida floods last week, and that was even shared by a US senator.

Slop is usually mass produced by AI-driven spam pages and boosted by recommendation algorithms. The motivation is financial – AI content is cheap to mass produce, and there is a chance you might cash in with either a creator fund, by driving traffic to ad-heavy websites, or promoting cheap products and scams. This content is increasingly prevalent across platforms, facilitating the rise of the “zombie internet”. As trend-chasing influencers and slop come to dominate platforms, any remaining remnants of genuine public discourse is lost, further distancing social media from being a reflection of public sentiment.

[ Elon Musk makes being a billionaire plutocrat look profoundly uncool ]

Of course, social media was never really a reliable barometer of public opinion. It might have been hailed as a space for democratic expression, but in reality its algorithms have always skewed the field toward sensationalism and outrage, playing into the hands of the much maligned political “bots”. Nevertheless platforms such as Facebook and Twitter did once serve as a tool for people like journalists and politicians to measure and engage with niche communities.

With an election looming, candidates and those covering the campaign will seek to take the temperature, to read the room and understand where the public mood is. It will be tempting to turn to the apps that have served to distil this in the past. But social media has lost much of the credibility it once held as a gauge for public opinion. Heading into a general election, this is going to making controlling the narrative much more challenging for political parties.

Liz Carolan works on democracy and technology issues, and writes at TheBriefing.ie