LONDON – When the Economist and Merriam-Webster announced “slop” as their word of the year, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella complained, but few were surprised. The past 18 months have been characterized by an unrelenting flood of brain-rot slop, political slop, scam slop, and, above all, porn slop. Recent estimates suggest Elon Musk’s Grok AI posts one nonconsensual pornographic image of a woman per minute on the social-media platform X (formerly Twitter). Not so long ago, social-media companies billed themselves as tools for connecting with real people and keeping up with the news. They have long since abandoned that promise. Having untethered...