(TibetanReview.net, Jan14’26) – US tech billionaire entrepreneur Palmer Luckey has said in a podcast interview that despite their advanced weapons capabilities, China’s strongest weapon may be the government’s ability to control the populace with propaganda and get people to buy into causes that might be completely false, said a barchart.com column Jan13.
He has expressed astonishment with China’s culture and how it differs from America, saying they’re much more open to censorship.
Providing a sweeping assessment of China’s control over political memory and public discourse, Luckey has argued in a conversation on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, that social norms and state systems reinforce one another. And he has described how many Chinese citizens dismiss Western concerns about historical atrocities such as Tiananmen Square as irrelevant, portraying those who raise the topic as disruptive.
Luckey has then expanded the point beyond a single issue and toward the strategic significance of narrative control, stating: “I’ve come to the conclusion that their most powerful weapon is not any bomb or missile or drone, it’s their ability to control people’s minds through the media, through propaganda, through state pressure.”
Luckey is best known as the founder of Oculus VR, the virtual reality company sold to Facebook (now Meta Platforms) in 2014, and the founder of the defense technology company Anduril Industries, which develops artificial intelligence (AI)-driven autonomous systems and advanced military hardware.
That dual background in consumer-facing immersive technology and national security-focused robotics shapes how Luckey views the competition between global powers: not only in missiles and drones, but also in information systems, persuasion, and the management of public attention, columnist Caleb Naysmith has noted.
The column noted that while discussion of censorship in China frequently focuses on what the state restricts (such as references to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown), it is also important to emphasize how thoroughly the topic can be erased from public view through education policy, media controls, and increasingly sophisticated digital filtering.
It is therefore not surprising that the Trump administration has described winning the ongoing AI race as a national security interest because these tools can be weaponized for propaganda and information control. Recent reports suggest that China is already using AI to “turbocharge” its information control systems, which will likely only exacerbate these issues.
Central to Luckey’s Argument is the fact that the strategic value lies not just in restricting speech, but in engineering a public environment in which restricted topics feel socially unnecessary to discuss.
With the ongoing mass adoption of AI, it’s likely this trend will continue. The internet allows for mass distribution of content, and now AI allows for the mass production of content – including content that could look completely real, even if it’s fake, the column piece noted.
Naysmith has noted that investors and policymakers increasingly treat AI not only as a productivity tool but as a strategic technology tied to national competitiveness. The same machine learning capabilities that power recommendation systems, content moderation, and social platforms can also be used to amplify narratives, suppress dissent, and personalize persuasion at scale.
As a result, industries spanning defense, social media, semiconductors, cybersecurity, and cloud infrastructure all intersect with the underlying theme in Luckey’s quote: information systems are not neutral; they are instruments that can shape perception and behaviour.