–Millions of US taxpayers (and billions of other citizens across the globe) are funneling their hard-earned money toward the rollout of potentially propagandizing artificial intelligence designed to protect elites
–If you believe the saturating hype pushed to investors right now, this AI also has virility, creative power, generative force and cosmic power.
Reporting and opinion by Mathew Carr
Call it artificial intelligence if you must.
Yet we are all beginning to realise that AI really is about creating an even more sophisticated global propaganda machine to win elections and control the people for the benefit of a few powerful people. At least, that’s the risk.
That is why investment is so intense and enormous right now.
Elite humans have been deploying propaganda for 1,000s of years.
On a trip this month with my family to Egypt, we visited the amazing Karnak Temple in Luxor, on the River Nile, where our guide pointed to the imagery on the surrounding monoliths and to the stories that underpinned massive statues.
“This was the Facebook of the time,” he said. Meta Platforms (god-like name) owns Facebook, Instagram and What’s App and last night enjoyed an $8 billion tax benefit in its accounts, even as it represents potentially the biggest propaganda risk on earth.
To get into the Luxor temple in 2026, tourists walk through an open corridor of giant criosphinxes, ram-headed statues designed to show that the human pharaoh was protected by the god of the time and so should be obeyed by the people of Egypt.
The god, in his ram form, was associated with virility, creative power, generative force and cosmic power, which was symbolically projected onto the human leader.
Perhaps 5,000 years after this symbolism was constructed, a similar strategy underpinned by Meta and other big tech is being deployed by elites, but on a global scale across the planet.
Instead of 1,000s of workers rolling giant stones on wooden poles to create temples and pyramids, millions of US taxpayers (and billions of other citizens across the globe) are funneling their hard-earned money toward the rollout of potentially propagandizing artificial intelligence designed to protect elites and bad politico-economic systems.
If you believe the saturating hype pushed to investors right now, this AI also has virility, creative power, generative force and cosmic power.
Last night, Meta Platforms’ $8 billion tax benefit in its Q1 financial results added to billions spent on corporate welfare for propaganda giants …I mean social media and tech companies …since the internet boom in the 1990s. A year ago, the Guardian newspaper reported the “silicon six” including Meta had already avoided $278 billion in US corporation tax over just 10 years. (see notes)
While the propaganda 5,000 years ago was no-doubt brutal (if you spoke against the pharaoh retaliation was supposedly swift), so is today’s.
The slow squeeze of the people by elites has been multi-decade, multi-pronged, secretive, highly sophisticated, well organized and ongoing.
AI continues to get important things wrong, squeezing mental health
As a further example of the squeeze, take this snip from the Financial Times:
The three stories published side by side here say a lot about the state of play as media ownership is concentrating and AI folks are prone to stealing, cheating and lying.
Here is tech billionaire Elon Musk …who knows about stealing content because that is what AI effectively does…accusing a different AI 🤖 company of stealing … while the US far right at Paramount (another god-like name) takes over once left-leaning media outlets … and the BMG music deal looks like German-rooted BMG is buying Nashville’s Concord … but where will the new headquarters be? Nashville!
And this media concentration is being financed by fossil-fuel money backed by an OPEC cartel / rigged market / brutal (yet spiritual) President Donald Trump violence DESIGNED to erode the wealth of the world’s ordinary folks by stoking inflation…
We all pay the price for too-high oil prices, not just the pollution. The profits are being funnelled into takeovers that are directly hurting our human rights.
Our media freedom, climate, money, intellectual property all being stolen simultaneously!
…and it’s still happening in plain sight…just wow. 😮 …while our flaccid so-called political leaders flail about.
Today’s big media freedom story is the RSF (Reporters Without Borders) 2026 World Press Freedom Index, released this morning.
Press freedom worldwide has fallen to its lowest level in 25 years, with RSF warning that journalism is increasingly being criminalised globally. 
That’s important because, without press freedom, the world’s people are much more vulnerable to propaganda and they have less leverage in setting economic and social systems that protect sustainability, equity and justice.
For the first time, the share of the world’s population living in a country rated “good” for press freedom has plunged from 20% to less than 1%, with only seven Northern European countries — led by Norway — earning that top rating (euronews framing). 
The US dropped seven places to 64th, with RSF citing Trump’s “systematic policy” of attacks on the press, including the detention of a journalist covering an immigration protest;
‘Spiritual Street Fighter’
… meanwhile Egypt ranked 169th, India 157th, and Russia 172nd, while Gaza and the West Bank were described as the most dangerous places in the world for journalists, with over 220 Palestinian journalists killed during the Israel-Hamas war. (Claude AI unchecked)
These news items above are just a few examples from today and yesterday. They evidence a stunningly massive and sophisticated propaganda-ramping regime.
It’s also stunningly creepy.
Egypt’s pharaohs would be impressed.
(More to come…feature under construction)
Notes
Gemini partly checked:
Why Meta received this “benefit”
- The Initial Loss: In Q3 2025, Meta recorded a massive $15.93 billion charge because new tax laws (the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”) initially appeared to make their previous R&D tax credits worthless.
- The Correction: In February 2026, the U.S. Treasury issued Notice 2026-7, which clarified that companies could actually use these R&D deductions to offset the CAMT.
- The “Benefit”: Because Meta had already told investors it lost $15.9 billion, it had to record this $8 billion “benefit” to show that a large portion of that projected loss was no longer happening. [1, 2, 5]
Why rivals didn’t record a similar benefit
- Different Accounting Timing: Other tech giants may not have taken as aggressive a “one-time charge” in 2025 as Meta did. Since they didn’t record the same massive upfront loss, they didn’t have a massive reversal to report when the new Treasury guidance arrived.
- Cloud vs. Internal Use: Rivals like Microsoft and Alphabet have large cloud businesses that sell AI capacity to others for revenue. Meta’s massive AI spending is almost entirely for internal use (powering its own social apps), which affects how they are required to capitalize and amortize those specific R&D costs.
- Plunging Tax Bills: While they didn’t get this specific $8 billion “line item,” other companies are seeing similar benefits differently. For example, Amazon’s 2025 federal tax bill dropped to $1.2 billion (from $9 billion in 2024) due to general AI investment incentives. [1, 6, 8, 9]
Criticism and Context
