In October, during another jubilant earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg happily declared that social media had entered a third phase, which is now centred around AI.
“First was when all content was from friends, family, and accounts that you followed directly.
“The second was when we added all of the creator content. Now as AI makes it easier to create and remix content, we’re going to add yet another huge corpus of content,” he told shareholders.
Meta, which runs social media sites Facebook, Instagram and Threads, is not only allowing people to post AI generated content – it’s launched products to enable more of it to be made. Image and video generators and increasingly powerful filters are now being offered across the board.
When approached for comment, Meta pointed the BBC to January’s earnings call. In that call, the billionaire said the firm was leaning even more into AI, and made no mention of any clampdown on slop.
“Soon we’ll see an explosion of new media formats that are more immersive and interactive, and only possible because of advances in AI,” Zuckerberg said.
YouTube’s CEO, Neal Mohan, wrote in his 2026 look-ahead blog that in December alone more than one million YouTube channels used the platform’s AI tools to make content.
“Just as the synthesizer, Photoshop and CGI revolutionized sound and visuals, AI will be a boon to the creatives who are ready to lean in,” he wrote.
The CEO also acknowledged that there are growing concerns about “low-quality content, aka AI slop”. He said his team is working on ways to improve systems to find and remove “low quality, repetitive content”.