Memes: The new frontier of American propaganda

This article first appeared in Volume 54, Issue 3 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Truth, trust and tricksters: Free expression in the age of AI, published on 30 September 2025. Read more about the issue here.

One of the greatest successes of the MAGA movement as they forced their way into the American cultural mainstream was their capture of social media. The world’s richest man Elon Musk purchased Twitter, converted it to X.com and made it a hub for right-wing thought, using his immense reach as the most followed account on the platform to push his own political beliefs to millions. His work earned him a spot at Donald Trump’s side in government (albeit a short-lived one), and he wasn’t the only tech mogul in Trump’s inner circle. At the presidential inauguration on 20 January Musk sat alongside Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, who lists both Facebook and Instagram in his portfolio, as well as Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google chief Sundar Pichai, all taking positions on Trump’s front row for the event.

It follows, then, that as AI rapidly takes the world by storm, Donald Trump and his team would not wait to use this new technology for political propaganda and the 47th administration of the USA has tapped into a Pandora’s box of AI-generated memes. The New Yorker described the government’s use of AI images and videos as “a form of MAGA agitprop”.

Alex Mahadevan, director of digital media literacy programme MediaWise, told Deutsche Welle: “What AI actually ended up doing was just creating a propaganda machine on steroids… It’s not designed to deceive the viewer; it’s designed to push a political message.”

These examples of AI propaganda start with Donald Trump in opposition campaigning to be president, but continue on official government accounts of the Trump administration.