Over a decade ago, the Islamic State released a disturbing video that depicted its members lowering men locked in a cage into a swimming pool and drowning them. Today, that video has been reproduced as a SpongeBob SquarePants cartoon depicting fish in orange jumpsuits inside the cage, as SpongeBob lowers the cage into the water while Squidward films the scene.
The video, shared on TikTok, is part of what a new report from the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD) calls “Slop Jihad,” a trend where young supporters of Islamic terror groups like ISIS and al-Qaida appear to use generative AI tools to create fan edits, cartoons, and memes designed radicalize a new generation of online backing.
This shift “signals a fundamental transformation in the aesthetics of jihadist propaganda online,” concludes the report, which was shared exclusively with WIRED.
“The principal concern is the growing volume and diversity of material,” says Adam Hadley, executive director of Tech Against Terrorism, a UN-backed counter terrorism organization that has also written a report about the Slop Jihad trend. “Highly stylized AI-generated content can make violent Islamist extremist material more accessible to younger audiences while reducing the visibility of conventional terrorist branding. Users may encounter perpetrator glorification inadvertently through fan edits, cartoons, memes, and other entertainment-oriented formats, after which engagement can drive algorithmic recommendations of related, more overt propaganda.”
Islamic terror groups have long demonstrated their capacity to adapt to new media environments to get their messages to a wide audience online, leveraging new and emerging technologies to aid recruitment and create a decentralized network of propaganda. This was seen in the early 2020s Alt Jihad movement, which sought to co-opt the aesthetics of the alt-right in the Islamic terrorism content.
These groups have also been making use of generative AI technology for a number of years. In 2024, the Islamic State-affiliated news program News Harvest began using AI-generated anchors to help disseminate propaganda videos quickly and cheaply.
But today, the look and feel of the content produced with generative AI is markedly different.
“This is new and it's still growing, it has not peaked by any means,” says Moustafa Ayad, the research chair in global Islamism and counter terrorism at ISD. “There's always been really shoddy content that's been produced in the support ecosystem, but it wasn't SpongeBob SquarePants as the Islamic State.”
Generative AI tools have also been utilized to quickly and cheaply turn official content from terror groups into animated videos. In one example, one TikTok account was turning the weekly al-Naba newsletter from ISIS into anime.
The Slop Jihad trend has seen some pushback from more traditional supporters who don’t like the new aesthetic. “There seems to be some animosity towards it, because they don't believe the producers of Slop Jihad are true believers,” Ayad says, referring to some reactions to the SpongeBob video. “But again, some accounts that have shared traditional official propaganda are sharing the newer videos. So there seems to be a love-hate relationship with the Slop Jihad content.”
For years now, TikTok has been central to Islamic terror groups online messaging campaign, taking advantage of the platform’s powerful algorithmic recommendations to spread their message. A report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 2024 found that TikTok was among the top 10 platforms used to spread terrorist and extremist content.
While Ayad did find a limited number of Slop Jihad videos on other platforms like Instagram and Facebook, the vast majority of the videos were found on TikTok. In total, he found 150 Slop Jihad videos from 71 accounts with more than 5.4 million total views on the platform. Ayad believes the prevalence of this content on TikTok is down to the platform’s For You Page algorithm “that is hyper-targeted to user interests.” He also credits the high level of general AI slop on the platform and “an existing entrenched ecosystem of jihadist support on the platform.”
TikTok contested the findings of the report. "This report's vague methodology reaches poorly evidenced conclusions and doesn't reflect how people use our platform,” a TikTok spokesperson tells WIRED. “We prohibit the presence of violent and hateful organisations, and we use a combination of advanced moderation technology, safety teams, and partnerships to proactively detect and remove violative content, as we keep TikTok a safe space for our community. All the content referenced in this report has been removed from TikTok."
Dozens of the videos identified by ISD for their report were deleted after WIRED shared them with TikTok.
WIRED shared the ISD report with several outside experts on Islamic terror groups' use of social media to radicalize followers, and all broadly agreed with ISD’s findings. “What is notable here is the ease with which generative AI allows a much broader and more decentralized set of users to remix jihadi figures and imagery and the extent to which that material can circulate across communities whose interest may be driven as much by violence, trolling, or notoriety as by actual commitment to jihadi ideology,” Aaron Zelin, a researcher who specializes in Jihadi extremism at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, tells WIRED.
While Ayad admits that some of the wilder Slop Jihad content may be difficult to identify as terror-related, much of it is very clearly supportive of terror groups and ideologies. TikTok has taken down some of the accounts Ayad was monitoring, but many of them have backup accounts in place and have signaled to their followers where they can find them in the case of a takedown.
“Some of the content is surviving for months at a time and continues to evade moderation efforts, whether it's their AI system that's meant to detect terrorist material or not,” Ayad says.
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