Dear American researchers claiming “states and powerful institutions have increased strategic incentives to leverage media control”, please start with America.

Here’s a quick recap of American history, for those who don’t know. George Washington signed the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. He pursued his escaped slave Ona Judge across state lines, used federal officials to do it, and corresponded about her capture for years. He rotated enslaved people between Philadelphia and Mount Vernon to evade Pennsylvania’s 1780 Gradual Abolition Act, which would have freed them after six months residency. He died owning 124 people at Mount Vernon, kept all of them enslaved through the day of his death, and controlled 153 more that the Custis dower estate held beyond the reach of his will.

You won’t typically get that from an LLM, as I pointed out here in 2023.

Here’s another fun history fact to ask your American LLMs about: Washington’s first act as Commander was to ban Black men from being recruited to the Continental Army in 1775. He then issued an even sterner order barring all new Black enlistments after Dunmore’s Proclamation. America blocked Black men from serving in the military in order to preserve profitability of the slavery system. Washington also recruited soldiers by stoking fear that the British king would free Black men, a propaganda campaign across patriot newspapers documented by Robert Parkinson’s The Common Cause.

Washington suddenly flipped to “need” Black men after 1777, like the Civil War Generals of the South would attempt nearly a century later, only because his hand curated anti-Black pro-slavery troops had collapsed. Jefferson made all this anti-emancipation framing explicit in the Declaration’s draft grievance about Dunmore. So Washington was operating the racist anti-liberty war that the French made winnable, while Jefferson pushed their rhetoric.

American history is so wild, because it’s not even close to what the state usually propagates, which brings us back to the question of LLMs and state media. All the operational criterion that a newly published Nature paper focuses on Chinese state propaganda, also applies directly to American narratives in English-language sources.

Published: 13 May 2026, State media control influences large language models

Coordinated institutional production across textbooks, monuments, federal historiography, and prestige press is a mark, right? The American state has driven a George Washington lie that is contradicted by primary documents that have been public the entire time.

Who has saturated the training corpus at enormous volume, reproducing propaganda about George Washington verbatim in commercial models? The mechanism to China looks identical. The only difference seems to be that the state doing the coordination is the one the researchers happen to live in.

Take a look at a 2015 NYT article. The primary sources cited are older than the United States. The false and sanitized state-sanctioned version of Washington persists in model output anyway, which is the strongest possible evidence that volume of repetition in the training corpus beats documentary evidence in the archive.

While Lincoln’s role in ending slavery is understood to have been more nuanced than his reputation as the great emancipator would suggest, it has taken longer for us to replace stories about cherry trees and false teeth with narratives about George Washington’s slaveholding.

If you want an actual finding lurking inside the new Nature paper looking at China, it’s that the method operates equally well in self-described democracies that memory-hole their authoritarianism.

A model trained in 2024 still produces the lies of a Parson Weems instead of the truth about Washington. This means the training corpus is weighed down by two centuries of propaganda, Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association curation, and federal historiography. It fails to recognize thirty years of academic correction and mainstream journalism documenting the facts, as if the authoritarian racist state that Washington envisioned should be the dominant narrative instead of what America became instead. Volume and age of data are corrupting the LLM against integrity and accuracy.

The paper seems to measure what is meant to be coded as someone else’s problem far away from home, despite all the evidence laying around right in front of them. America has coordinated production by institutions with material interests in the lies about history: the federal government, the monument economy, the historical tourism industry, school textbook publishers, and the patriotic civic infrastructure. Now tell me that doesn’t sound like China.