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Authoritarian alignment
Funding, gifting to, or complying with the demands of an authoritarian power in place.
58 documented facts
Confirmed to CNBC a $5 million donation to President Donald Trump's White House ballroom project, after The Washington Post reported a list of major donors to the project; the Post reported that the donations were sent through a nonprofit trust.
Confirmed to CNBC a donation to President Donald Trump's White House ballroom project; The Washington Post reported that Nvidia pledged $25 million, among the largest donations on a list totalling more than $330 million.
Response: An Nvidia spokesperson said: "As an American company, our support for the United States is paramount, and independent of any business interests. We were proud to be able to make a donation to a nonpartisan trust that serves all Americans and have said so publicly since the donation was made."
Listed among the major donors to President Donald Trump's White House ballroom project in documents reported by The Washington Post.
Response: Salesforce did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.
Confirmed it had removed Blued and Finka, two of China's most popular gay dating apps, from its Chinese App Store on the order of the Cyberspace Administration of China.
Response: Apple said the removal was "based on an order from the Cyberspace Administration of China" and that it must follow the laws of the countries where it operates.
Listed by the White House among the donors funding President Donald Trump's planned White House ballroom. According to CNBC, Alphabet is contributing $22 million, about 7% of the project's estimated cost, under the settlement reached with Trump the previous month over his lawsuit against YouTube for banning him from the platform after the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol; the settlement says the money will be contributed on Trump's behalf to the Trust for the National Mall.
Removed a Chicago Facebook group used to report sightings of immigration agents after outreach from the Justice Department, as announced by Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said the page was used to "dox and target" ICE agents.
Response: Meta said the group "was removed for violating our policies against coordinated harm".
Removed Eyes Up, an app that archived TikToks, Instagram reels, news reports and videos documenting abuses by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, from the App Store on October 3, 2025, according to its administrator. 404 Media reported that the app had been swept up in Apple's and Google's crackdown on ICE-spotting apps, which started after Department of Justice pressure on Apple to remove ICEBlock, although Eyes Up did not report sightings of ICE officers in real time. Engadget reported that Apple had removed ICEBlock the previous week following, according to Fox Business, a direct request from Attorney General Pam Bondi, and that Eyes Up remained available on the Google Play Store.
Response: According to 404 Media, as reported by Engadget, Apple said it removed Eyes Up for violating its "objectionable content" policy and because it had received information from law enforcement that the app was used "to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group."
Removed ICEBlock, an app for reporting the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, and similar apps from the App Store after the US Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Justice Department had demanded it.
Response: Apple said it removed the app "based on information we've received from law enforcement about the safety risks associated with ICEBlock". The app's creator, Joshua Aaron, said he was "incredibly disappointed by Apple's actions".
Listed by the White House among the donors funding President Donald Trump's ballroom. Individual amounts were not disclosed. The Washington Post later reported that Amazon contributed multiple millions of dollars.
Listed by the White House among the donors funding President Donald Trump's ballroom. Individual amounts were not disclosed. The Washington Post later reported that Apple pledged $25 million, among the largest donations.
Listed by the White House among the donors funding President Donald Trump's ballroom. Individual amounts were not disclosed at the time. In October 2026, The New Republic, citing The Washington Post, listed HP's contribution at $2.5 million.
Listed by the White House among the donors funding President Donald Trump's ballroom. Individual amounts were not disclosed. The Washington Post later reported that Meta made a contribution in the millions of dollars.
Response: Meta declined to comment on the Washington Post report.
Listed by the White House among the donors funding President Donald Trump's ballroom. Individual amounts were not disclosed. The Washington Post later reported that Microsoft made a contribution in the millions of dollars.
Response: Microsoft declined to comment on the Washington Post report.
Appears on the list, released by the White House in October 2025, of donors funding President Trump's new White House ballroom, built after the demolition of the East Wing. The amounts were not disclosed at the time; in October 2026 The Washington Post reported, as cited by CNBC, that Palantir's contribution was in the millions.
Response: Palantir did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.
Agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle Donald Trump's 2021 lawsuit over the suspension of his account, of which $22 million is to be contributed on Trump's behalf to the Trust for the National Mall, the nonprofit overseeing the construction of a White House ballroom. Legal experts had predicted Trump had little chance of prevailing.
Response: The settlement filing states it "does not constitute an admission of liability". Google confirmed the settlement and declined further comment.
In the Oval Office, gave Donald Trump a customized glass plaque mounted on a 24-karat gold stand while announcing $100 billion in additional Apple investment in US manufacturing. Trump said he planned a 100% tariff on semiconductor chips, which companies building in the United States, such as Apple, would avoid.
The Associated Press reported in May 2025 that Microsoft had cancelled, according to ICC staffers, the email address of International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Karim Khan after President Trump sanctioned him by executive order. A Microsoft spokesperson later referred to "the process that resulted in the disconnection of its sanctioned official from Microsoft services".
Response: Microsoft said that "at no point did Microsoft cease or suspend its services to the ICC". Brad Smith said Microsoft's actions "did not in any way involve the cessation of services to the ICC".
Gave $1 million to Donald Trump's 2025 inaugural committee, according to the committee's filing with the Federal Election Commission disclosed on 20 April 2025.
Restricted access in Turkey to accounts targeted by Turkish authorities, hiding them from users in Turkey through a geographic moderation label applied in its official app. TechCrunch reported that Bluesky restricted 72 accounts at the request of Turkish governmental authorities. The Stockholm Center for Freedom, citing Turkey's Freedom of Expression Association (İFÖD), reported a different breakdown: 59 of those accounts were blocked at the internet service provider level under Turkish court orders, and Bluesky itself made 13 accounts and one post inaccessible in Turkey.
Response: Bluesky did not comment publicly on the restrictions. The accounts were not removed from the network and remained visible outside Turkey and in third-party apps that do not apply the label.
Agreed to pay $25 million to settle the lawsuit Donald Trump filed in July 2021 accusing it of censoring his accounts after the January 6 attack on the Capitol, including a $22 million donation to his presidential library and $3 million in legal fees.
The Guardian reported that DeepSeek's AI assistant declined to answer questions about the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square events, what happened to Hu Jintao in 2022 and the Umbrella Revolution, noting that Chinese generative AI must not contain content that violates the country's "core socialist values" under a national standards document. A September 2025 evaluation by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology found that DeepSeek models "echoed four times as many inaccurate and misleading CCP narratives" as US reference models.
“Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.”
Donated $750,000 to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, which organised Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration; the committee's report to the Federal Election Commission lists a donation from IBM Corporation received on January 15, 2025.
Donated $1,000,000 to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, which organised Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration; the committee's report to the Federal Election Commission lists a donation from Nvidia Corporation received on January 13, 2025.
Donated $1 million to Donald Trump's 2025 inaugural fund, a donation confirmed by a company spokesperson.
Announced a $1 million donation to Donald Trump's 2025 inaugural fund, up from $500,000 to each of the 2017 and 2021 inaugurations. The inaugural committee reported to the Federal Election Commission receiving $750,000 from Microsoft, while Microsoft told Congress it gave $1 million in two installments.
Donated $50,000 to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, which organised Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration; the committee's report to the Federal Election Commission lists a donation from Anthropic, PBC received on January 8, 2025.
Donated $1,000,000 to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, which organised Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration. The committee's report to the Federal Election Commission lists the donation as received on January 6, 2025, and Bloomberg reported that spokespeople for the companies it named, including Adobe, confirmed the donations.
Announced it had licensed a documentary about incoming first lady Melania Trump, who served as executive producer, in a deal reported at about $40 million, shortly after Jeff Bezos met Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago and reports that Bezos planned to donate $1 million to his inaugural fund. Amazon reportedly spent about $35 million more promoting the film.
Response: Amazon MGM Studios said: "We licensed the film for one reason and one reason only — because we think customers are going to love it."
Personally donated $1 million to Donald Trump's 2025 inaugural fund.
Donated $250,000 to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, which organised Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration. The committee's report to the Federal Election Commission lists the contribution from PayPal, Inc. as received on December 27, 2024, and Rolling Stone reported the same amount.
Donated $1,000,000 to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, which organised Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration; the committee's report to the Federal Election Commission lists a donation from Intuit Incorporated received on December 20, 2024.
Donated $1,000,000 to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, which organised Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration; the committee's report to the Federal Election Commission lists a donation from Broadcom, Inc received on December 16, 2024.
Pledged a $1 million personal donation to Donald Trump's 2025 inaugural fund, as confirmed by OpenAI.
“President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead.”
Donated $1,000,000 to the Trump Vance Inaugural Committee, which organised Donald Trump's January 2025 inauguration; the committee's report to the Federal Election Commission lists a donation from Perplexity AI, Inc. received on December 13, 2024.
Donated $1 million to Donald Trump's 2025 inaugural fund and streamed the inauguration on Prime Video, an in-kind donation reported as worth another $1 million.
Donated $1 million to Donald Trump's 2025 inaugural fund.
Made several censorship-circumvention Firefox add-ons, including Censor Tracker, Runet Censorship Bypass and two VPN or proxy extensions, unavailable in Russia on its add-on store after persistent removal demands from Russia's censorship agency Roskomnadzor. Mozilla reversed the decision and reinstated the listings on 13 June 2024, the day after The Intercept reported the restrictions.
“After careful consideration, we've temporarily restricted their availability within Russia.”
Response: Announcing the reversal, Mozilla said: "Our initial decision to temporarily restrict these listings was made while we considered the regulatory environment" and the potential risk to its community and staff, and that it would reinstate them "in alignment with our commitment to an open and accessible Internet".
Removed WhatsApp and Threads from its App Store in China on the order of the Cyberspace Administration of China, which cited national security concerns.
Response: Apple said: "We are obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree."
The day before Turkey's presidential election, restricted access in Turkey to four accounts and 409 tweets identified by Turkish court order, including those of a Kurdish businessman critical of President Erdoğan and an investigative journalist.
“In response to legal process and to ensure Twitter remains available to the people of Turkey, we have taken action to restrict access to some content in Turkey today.”
Response: Musk said: "The choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?"
Removed Quran Majeed, one of the most popular Quran apps, from its App Store in China following a request from Chinese officials; the BBC understood it was removed for hosting illegal religious texts.
Response: Apple declined to comment and referred to its human rights policy, which states it is "required to comply with local laws".
During Russia's State Duma election, restricted bots associated with election campaigning, citing Russia's "election silence" rule, which disabled the Smart Voting bot of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny's team. Apple and Google had removed the Smart Voting app from their Russian stores the day before; Russian authorities had labelled Navalny's network extremist.
“Мы считаем эту практику легитимной и призываем пользователей Telegram уважать ее.”
Response: Pavel Durov said Telegram was following the precedent set by Apple and Google, which "dictate the rules of the game to developers like us", and warned their removal set a dangerous precedent for free speech.
Removed the Smart Voting app of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny's allies from its Russian App Store as parliamentary elections began, after Russia demanded the removal and said a refusal would be treated as meddling in the election.
Removed the tactical voting app of jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny's allies from the Google Play Store in Russia as parliamentary elections began, after Russia demanded the removal and said a refusal would be treated as meddling in the election.
Response: Google issued no formal statement. A person familiar with the decision told CNN that Google blocked the app because of legal demands from Russia's internet regulator and after Russian authorities threatened its local staff with criminal prosecution.
In September 2021 LinkedIn notified several US journalists and writers, including Axios China reporter Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, writer Melissa Chan and author Greg Bruno, that their profiles would no longer be viewable on its localized China platform because they contained "prohibited content". LinkedIn said it adheres to Chinese government regulations for that version and offered to review the profiles' accessibility in China if they were edited. Earlier, in March 2021, Chinese internet regulators had penalised LinkedIn for failing to control political content and it halted new sign-ups in China for 30 days. The Committee to Protect Journalists called for the profiles to be restored.
“We're a global platform that respects the laws that apply to us, including adhering to Chinese government regulations”
Response: On 14 October 2021 LinkedIn announced it would close its localized social network in China, citing "a significantly more challenging operating environment and greater compliance requirements in China", and replace it with a jobs-only app, InJobs.
Suspended the built-in VPN of its browsers for users in Russia on 17 June 2021, the day Russia's censorship agency Roskomnadzor announced it was restricting access to Opera VPN and VyprVPN as tools for bypassing blocks on prohibited content. An Opera spokesperson told TASS the company had suspended VPN support in its browsers on Russian territory in the form previously offered. Opera has been controlled by the Chinese company Kunlun Tech since 2016.
“We decided to suspend support for VPN services in our browsers on the Russian territory in the form it was provided earlier.”
Response: Opera described the move as a "preventive step" and said it continued to protect Russian users with tracking protection and DNS over HTTPS, adding that it was "ready for an open dialog on user security in the Internet".
ByteDance's main Chinese subsidiary, Beijing ByteDance Technology, which runs Douyin and Toutiao, sold a 1% stake to a unit of the state-backed China Internet Investment Fund and gave the government investor a board seat, a transaction reported in August 2021.
During the protests that followed Belarus's August 2020 presidential election, A1 Belarus, the Belarusian subsidiary of A1 Telekom Austria Group, throttled its subscribers' mobile internet on the authorities' orders, the last ordered throttling taking place in November 2020. CEO Thomas Arnoldner wrote in an open letter that A1 had been made to reduce internet speeds on some days at specified locations, and that it complied because the authorities could otherwise cut off the internet nationwide. The Open Society Justice Initiative filed an OECD complaint against the group in March 2022. A1 Digital, part of the group, has held a majority stake in Exoscale since 2017.
“Wir haben dies auch vor dem Hintergrund gemacht, weil die Behörden in Belarus technisch die Möglichkeit außerhalb unseres Netzes haben, bei Nichteinhaltung der Anordnungen das gesamte Internet im gesamten Land nicht nur zu drosseln, sondern zu unterbinden.”
Response: A1 says the throttling was ordered by the Belarusian state, which controls the national internet gateway and could otherwise shut down all internet access, and that the deep packet inspection software A1 Belarus used served commercial network optimisation and was not accessible to the authorities.
After the Chinese government demanded that Zoom terminate meetings commemorating the June 4 Tiananmen Square crackdown and their host accounts, Zoom ended three of the four meetings and suspended or terminated host accounts (one in Hong Kong, four in the US), including actions affecting Hong Kong activist Lee Cheuk-yan and US-based dissidents Wang Dan and Zhou Fengsuo. It also gave Chinese authorities a limited amount of data on China-based attendees.
Response: Zoom acknowledged two mistakes, reinstated all the host accounts and said it "will not allow requests from the Chinese government to impact anyone outside of mainland China."
Agreed to significantly increase restrictions on "anti-state" posts for users in Vietnam after state-owned telecoms throttled Facebook for about seven weeks, according to Reuters sources.
Response: Facebook confirmed it had reluctantly complied with the government's request to restrict access to content it deemed illegal.
Removed HKmap.live, a crowdsourced map of police positions used during the Hong Kong anti-government protests, from the App Store, a day after the Chinese Communist Party newspaper People's Daily attacked Apple over the app.
Response: Apple said the app "has been used to target and ambush police" and "threaten public safety". Tim Cook told employees Apple had received "credible information" that it was being "used maliciously". The app's developers said there was "0 evidence" to support the accusation that the app had been used to target and ambush police.
Leaked TikTok moderation guidelines revealed by the Guardian instructed moderators to censor videos mentioning Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence or the banned religious group Falun Gong, which the Guardian described as ByteDance advancing Chinese foreign policy aims abroad through the app.
Response: ByteDance said the version of the guidelines seen by the Guardian was retired in May 2019, that the old guidelines took "a blunt approach" and were outdated, and that current guidelines do not reference specific countries or issues.
Disabled ratings, comments and reviews for Xi Jinping's book "The Governance of China" on its Chinese site, Amazon.cn, around 2019 in response to an edict from Beijing triggered by reviews below five stars, according to a December 2021 Reuters investigation.
Response: Amazon said it "complies with all applicable laws and regulations, wherever we operate, and China is no exception".
The Intercept revealed, from leaked documents, that Google was developing "Dragonfly", a censored search engine for China that would blacklist websites and search terms about human rights, democracy, religion and peaceful protest. Work on the project was reported to have effectively ended in December 2018 after internal opposition.
Response: CEO Sundar Pichai told Congress in December 2018 that "right now" there were no plans to launch the search engine.
After China's media regulator ordered ByteDance's joke-sharing app Neihan Duanzi permanently shut down, published an open letter of apology saying, in TechNode's translation, the app's content went against "core socialist values" and that the company had not done a thorough job "guiding public opinion", accepting the penalty and pledging to grow its content review team from 6,000 to 10,000 staff.
Removed Al Jazeera's Discover Publisher Channel from Snapchat in Saudi Arabia after the Saudi government said the channel violated local laws, during the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar, where Al Jazeera is based.
“We make an effort to comply with local laws in the countries where we operate.”
Response: Al Jazeera's acting Director-General Mostefa Souag said: "We find Snapchat's action to be alarming and worrying."
Removed VPN apps used to bypass China's internet censorship, including ExpressVPN, from its App Store in China after the government required VPN providers to hold a state licence.
Response: Apple said: "We have been required to remove some VPN apps in China that do not meet the new regulations. These apps remain available in all other markets where they do business."
Donated $100,000 to Donald Trump's 2017 inaugural committee through Wings of Time LLC, a company managed by an entity of which Luckey is the sole officer, according to inaugural committee filings and California corporate records reviewed by Mother Jones.
Response: Luckey and his attorney did not respond to Mother Jones's requests for comment.
After Russia's media regulator Roskomnadzor asked Hetzner to get the Ukrainian news site Glavcom.ua to remove an article about a planned march for the federalisation of Siberia, a Hetzner employee asked Glavcom by email to delete the information and warned that the site could be suspended if it did not comply within 24 hours, citing Hetzner's terms of service. Reporters Without Borders Germany said the article did not breach Hetzner's terms or any law. Glavcom moved its site to Ukrainian servers.
Response: Hetzner's request cited its own terms and conditions, not the Russian complaint. On August 10, 2014, Hetzner apologised to Glavcom, denied that any censorship had been planned and said its technical support team had taken a wrong decision that it regretted.