Your feed is lying to you. Again.

This morning, the algorithmic gods decided we needed a new brand of fan fiction masquerading as news: Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau are apparently expecting a child. It’s the kind of headline that makes you want to throw your iPhone into a lake. It’s nonsense, obviously. Pure, unadulterated digital sludge.

We’ve reached the "post-truth" era and realized it’s actually just the "lazy" era. This rumor didn't start with a leaked ultrasound or a grainy paparazzi shot outside a Montreal bistro. It started in the humid basement of a generative AI model that’s been fed too much Reddit and not enough sanity. It’s a hallucination with a PR budget.

Perry is currently busy trying to convince the world that her latest musical output wasn't a collective fever dream. Trudeau is busy watching his political capital evaporate faster than a Canadian puddle in July. They aren't co-parenting. They probably haven't been in the same ZIP code since the 2017 Juno Awards. But the platform owners don't care about the veracity. Engagement is engagement, whether it’s a verified geopolitical shift or a fever-swamp lie about a pop star’s womb.

Look at the "Trending" sidebar on any given social app. It’s a graveyard of context. Every click on this "news" generates a fraction of a cent for a company that’s already fired its entire trust and safety team to protect the bottom line. The friction here isn't just the lie; it's the cost of the infrastructure that supports it. We’re paying for this garbage with our attention, while the actual cost of human-verified reporting has become a luxury most people won't pay $12 a month for.

The rumor mill used to require effort. You needed a disgruntled assistant, a telephoto lens, or at least a semi-believable tip to a tabloid. Now? All you need is a $20 subscription to a Large Language Model and a total lack of shame. These stories are "slop"—the industry term for the AI-generated filler currently clogging every corner of the web. It’s SEO bait. It’s designed to catch the wandering eyes of people who still think a blue checkmark means "vetted" rather than "I gave Elon my credit card info."

It’s a perfect storm of digital decay. You have a pop star who is permanently online and a world leader who has become a lightning rod for every conspiracy theorist with a Wi-Fi connection. Stick them in a prompt. Tell the bot to make it "viral." Add a thumbnail of a poorly photoshopped bump. Success. You’ve successfully polluted the information stream for another afternoon.

The real friction is the death of the "Correctness Tax." In the old days, if a major outlet ran a fake story about a G7 leader impregnating a celebrity, they’d be sued into the Stone Age. Lawyers would feast. Settlements would hit eight figures. Today, the platforms just shrug. They’ve built a system where accountability is a bug, not a feature. They’ve offloaded the labor of "truth" onto the user, expecting us to navigate a minefield of hallucinations for free while they scrape the data from our confusion.

The truth is boring. The truth is that two famous people are living their entirely separate, equally stressful lives. But boring doesn't sell ads for VPNs or overpriced athletic greens. We’re being fed a diet of high-fructose misinformation because the alternative—actual reality—is too expensive for the current VC-backed model of the web.

It’s not just Perry and Trudeau. Tomorrow it’ll be Taylor Swift buying a private island in the Hudson or your local congressperson being replaced by a sophisticated toaster. We’re so deep in the slop that we’ve forgotten what the floor looks like. The internet isn't a library anymore; it’s a landfill. And we’re all just scavengers looking for a bit of scrap that doesn't smell like rot.

The algorithm doesn't care if you're outraged or delighted, as long as you're still scrolling. But hey, at least the deepfakes are getting better at the lighting. Soon, we won’t even need the real people at all, which would probably be a relief for everyone involved.

How long before we just stop looking at the screen entirely?