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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 26/05/2026

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State media control influences large language models
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10506-7
Received: 25 October 2024
Accepted: 8 April 2026
Published online: 13 May 2026

Hannah Waight'*, Eddie Yang?%, Yin Yuan', Solomon Messing', Margaret E. Roberts", Brandon M. Stewart® & Joshua A. Tucker47

Millions of people around the world query large language models (LLMs) for information. Although several studies have compellingly documented the persuasive potential of these models'-1, there is limited evidence of who or what influences the models themselves, leading to a flurry of concerns about which companies and governments build and regulate the models. Here we show through six studies that government control of the media across the world already influences the output of LLMs via their training data. We use a cross-national audit to show that LLMs exhibit a stronger pro-government valence in the languages of countries with lower media freedom than in those with higher media freedom. This result is correlational, so to triangulate the specific mechanism of how state media control can influence LLMs, ve develop a multi-part case study on China's media. We demonstrate that media scripted and curated by the Chinese state appears in LLM training datasets. To evaluate the plausible effect of this inclusion, we use an open-weight model to show that additional pretraining on Chinese state-coordinated media generates more positive answers to prompts about Chinese political institutions and leaders. We link this phenomenon to commercial models through two audit studies demonstrating that prompting models in Chinese generates more positive responses about China's institutions and leaders than do the same queries in English. The combination of influence and persuasive potential across languages suggests the troubling conclusion that states and powerful institutions have increased strategic incentives to leverage media control in the hopes of shaping LLM output.

New paper in Nature. The more a government controls its domestic media, the more it dominates AI training data, the more pro-regime outputs we get from AI. By scraping the open web, LLMs are unwittingly laundering state-coordinated narratives into seemingly objective answers.

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Spookybeth Fae @yurifae.northsky.social · 26/05/2026

Woag, who could have foreseen that if you only allow and publish a certain narrative, the regurgitation machine will increasingly spit out that *same* narrative???? simply no one. ever. just trust me bro. truly mind boggling…

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