Blue Jays star Alejandro Kirk’s mother is dead. So is Kazuma Okamoto’s. John Schneider has cancer. George Springer opened a free hospital for the unhoused, but also came out in support of ICE. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. is feuding with Whoopi Goldberg while Mark Shapiro beefs with Greta Thunberg. Kevin Gausman paid the medical bills of 50 cancer patients. Braydon Fisher adopted 10 children. The front office is building a multi-million-dollar statue of Charlie Kirk outside the Rogers Centre. The FBI has raided Joe Carter’s home. The Blue Jays pickleball team’s jet crashed, leaving no survivors. 

None of this actually happened. Yet stories like these circulate constantly through Blue Jays Facebook groups, reaching tens of thousands of followers. They’re generated at industrial scale by content farms and individual users as part of the broader proliferation of low-effort AI-generated content now widely known as slop. A blend of fake news, weird imagery and engagement bait funnels users toward scam-laden fake-news websites designed to harvest advertising revenue, collect personal information or facilitate phishing schemes.

One of the most notable examples is the “Shrimp Jesus” phenomenon, when bizarre AI-generated religious images including Christ-like figures composed of crustaceans flooded Facebook feeds. Slop ecosystems are a predictable consequence of platform enshittification, the process by which digital platforms gradually degrade as they optimize for growth, monetization and extraction at the expense of user experience and information quality. 

I first encountered Blue Jays slop when a post from a fake Alejandro Kirk account denouncing gay marriage appeared in my feed. Curious about its origin, I clicked it—unintentionally signalling to the algorithm that I desired more slop. Soon my feed, already heavy with Jays content, was filling up with wild claims and surreal hallucinations. Across Facebook, dozens of groups with names like “Blue Jays Beat,” alongside fake player accounts, form an ecosystem that churns out a steady stream of slop into the feeds of an often credulous audience. Their existence is neither accidental nor organic. 

Similar slop ecosystems surround every major sports fandom, where it seems like every star and team is gifting free season tickets to veterans or visiting their beloved fans in hospital. Deepfakes have emerged of Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi giving each other haircuts. European football clubs are beginning to take notice of the negative impacts that slop can have on their brand and players’ reputation, but their options to respond remain limited, so the slop continues to proliferate. 

Related: Why the Internet Is Worse Than Ever

A 2025 investigation by Agence France-Presse found that AI-generated content was widespread during the Blue Jays’ playoff run and was frequently amplified by content farms. AFP identified 32 Facebook pages posting baseball-related AI-generated content to a combined audience of 248,000 followers. According to Facebook’s page-transparency data, many of these pages were administered from Southeast Asia rather than by Blue Jays fans or local media outlets. Similar pages are still active, reacting to real and imagined storylines with fresh slop.

Much of the slop is banal, such as announcements that an athlete has gotten engaged or done some charity work. Some, however, is genuinely damaging. Although the Blue Jays were one of the first MLB........

© Macleans