You're riled up. It might be the overnight 30 cent hike in the price of a litre of petrol. Or the half day wasted waiting for the plumber to turn up and the fainting fit he caused with the quote to fix the toilet. Could be any number of things.

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You open your social media feed for some light relief. There's a poll asking if enough is being done by Anthony Albanese to bring down the cost of living. You arc up and reflexively stab the NO button. In no time your feed is full of similar polls as well as memes and rants from political influencers telling you how Australia is circling the drain.

Congratulations. You've just become part of the slop economy.

The polls are not just statistically useless; most of the time they're not even produced in Australia. Their whole point is to get you to engage, each click earning money for the person who designed them, often someone with a laptop in Vietnam, Sri Lanka, India or Indonesia.

And the influencers might not be real either, as an ABC investigation discovered last week when it looked into a YouTube channel called Oceania Unfiltered in which a bloke with a convincing Australian accent rails against Anthony Albanese and promotes One Nation.

Turns out the face belongs to a Brazilian and the accent is AI-generated. But three million viewers have tuned in across dozens of the inflammatory videos, which are part of a thriving cottage industry for the person creating them. Whoever it is - it's unknown whether the person's face has been scraped without their knowledge - has produced similar far-right commentary with American and Portuguese accents.

This junk, called slopaganda, is designed to prey on people's frustration and gullibility. It is being produced on an industrial scale. It drives engagement with whatever platform hosts it. Its creators are paid for the eyeballs they attract. Oceania Unfiltered has racked up 45,000 subscribers on YouTube, which now warns viewers that the content is AI-generated.

The plethora of genuine-looking Facebook groups supporting One Nation should also be approached with suspicion because some of the largest ones are not homegrown, rather set up by "digital creators" in Indonesia and India.

In June The Guardian reported that one of the largest pro-Hanson groups, with 117,000 followers, was run by administrators based in Indonesia. These admins bragged about how much engagement their pages were generating and how Meta would pay $US20 for posts that reached 50,000 people. Easy money for someone creating hate bait about, say, Muslims, even if they themselves are wearing a hijab.

We're not sure........

© The Examiner