The alignment of polluter and cyber elites creates ever more febrile conditions for lethal, if not apocalyptic, outcomes on a grand scale.
Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon all reportedly supported US election candidates who were climate deniers during 2024. Elon Musk alone spent a reported $277 million backing Trump and other Republican candidates for election.
Apple, Microsoft and Google’s chief executives all offered “congratulations” to Donald Trump, for his second swearing-in as president and gave millions of dollars to his inaugural committee.
READ: POLLUTER AND CYBER ELITES PART 1.
The Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, said he he was “optimistic and celebrating", as he prepared to jointly host a ball for Trump’s inauguration, in comments that came minutes after Trump had ordered the nation’s exit from the Paris Agreement.
Algorithm
Trump’s administration went on to announce a range of policy recommendations for AI that included weakening the Clean Water Act in connection to water-hungry data centres.
The proposals were reported to closely echo recommendations suggested by Meta, and a lobbying group representing the interests of big data centres run by the likes of Google and Amazon.
Political bias seems increasingly designed into the technology itself, with polarising algorithms propelling the ‘addiction engines’ of social media platforms.
Research by Finnish think-tank Sitra into material fed to young people on Instagram, X and TikTok revealed it carried a strong right wing bias.
Profiles in the 18 to 24 age group were studied across three countries, France, Finland and Romania. Content served to them by the algorithm was found to be 58 per cent right wing, 16 per cent centrist and only 26 per cent to the left.
Vulnerable
The alignment of polluter and cyber elites creates ever more febrile conditions for lethal, if not apocalyptic, outcomes on a grand scale.
Earlier research on the platform Twitter, since rebranded X by Musk, shows an increase of right wing bias in terms of material promoted shortly after the billionaire's endorsement of Trump in July 2024.
Internal documents released by whistleblowers from Meta and TikTok also reveal a dangerous alignment between corporations’ commercial objectives and the promotion of extreme, racist, sexist and violent material - all of which pander to right wing, so-called ‘anti-woke’ attitudes.
When these companies noticed higher levels of engagement in response to extreme material, it seems controls were loosened and algorithms adjusted to increase the amount of such harmful content put in front of people, including young people.
Higher engagement levels mean higher advertising revenue and protect a company’s share price.
The patchy management of harmful material also seems to have prioritised protecting high profile politicians over vulnerable young people. In other words, hate and division are promoted aggressively in the cause of selling ads online.
Billionaire
Recent research by Liam Byrne, a Labour MP, identified a ‘media-political complex’ boosting hard right wing political agendas that attracted £170 million in funding over a five year period.
Three quarters of that amount went to right wing media platforms: GB News, the Critic and UnHerd.
More than £130 million came from just four sources, crypto investor Christopher Harborne, a major donor to the extreme right Reform Party); the Dubai-based investment company Legatum; the financier Jeremy Hosking and hedge funder Paul Marshall.
By setting news agendas, the right-leaning political bias in the concentrated private ownership of both legacy and new digital media, tends also then to be magnified by public sector broadcasters.
The BBC, for example, has a daily slot on ‘what the papers say’, both online and in its broadcast news. Because there is a predominance of right wing legacy media in the UK that means that the political views of the papers and their billionaire owners are disproportionately amplified.
Doom-prepping
This has editorial knock-on consequences for the views and voices that, once normalised, are in turn further promoted.
Research on the platforming of political parties by UK public service broadcasters, for example, showed a marked bias in favour of the hard-right Reform Party compared to the progressive left Green Party. In 2025 the Greens were referenced just 32 times compared to Reform’s 213.
Prominence in news stories was also very unequal. Between January and September that year, Reform led 69 news stories on the BBC and ITV’s News at Ten programmes, and the Green Party only four. On the BBC’s flagship political discussion programme, Question Time, the Greens appeared only about one third as often as Reform.
At some level, however, it seems that the cyber elite are aware of the potential consequences of their influence peddling, and support for politicians who oppose action to keep a safe climate.
The BBC reported that tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg are apparently ‘doom prepping’ – building vast, luxury underground bunkers to retreat into. Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, referred to this as ‘apocalypse insurance’.
Adopters
The acute irony of this response is that, intentionally or otherwise, the alignment of polluter and cyber elites creates ever more febrile conditions for lethal, if not apocalyptic, outcomes on a grand scale.
Dr Stuart Parkinson, the director of Scientists for Global Responsibility, speaking at its annual Responsible Science conference, identified the problematic common interests of these two groups, namely: energy intensification, industrial deregulation and militarisation. There are indicators of increasing political alignment.
Global energy supply is still over 80 per cent reliant on fossil fuels. Meanwhile, the depletion of reserves together with rising demand is pushing a move to ‘unconventional’ and more polluting fossil fuels like oil shale, gas from fracking, and tar sands.
On deregulation, while the fossil fuel industries lobby against climate action, the information and communication technology (ICT) sector pushes back on attempts to regulate the environmental, social and economic threats on everything from data centres to crypto-currencies and social media platforms.
When it comes to militarisation, the fossil fuel and ICT industries are both deeply entwined with the military. Early adopters and heavy users of fossil fuels, many wars are also fought for their control.
Libertarian
Not only is the military very dependent on oil, it has multiple exemptions from climate and environmental regulations. At the same time, the application of AI and use of drones and autonomous weapons has rapidly become a feature of conflict.
The names of Amazon, Google and Microsoft have all been implicated in the context of the Israeli genocide on Gaza in which the UN Human Rights Council concluded that, “the State of Israel bears responsibility for the failure to prevent genocide, the commission of genocide and the failure
to punish genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip”, says Parkinson. He adds that attempts to update arms control agreements and international humanitarian law to cover the new information technologies have been bogged down in negotiations.
Put together there is a toxic cocktail of a far-right political agenda mixing with increased military spending and attempts to deregulate on climate and the environment more broadly, human and workplace rights.
A matching accessory to appease these elites - who often espouse libertarian beliefs and the importance of free speech - appears to be the criminalisation of protest that questions or resists their agenda.
Commercial
Part of the deregulation also sees many of these same private sector actors taking on government roles, and links being built with the nuclear industry.
It seems we really are in an apocalyptic conspiracy of shared interests between polluter and cyber elites, driven at a deep level by their need to generate revenue by putting advertising in front of us, thus maintaining overconsumption.
All this for the purpose of what Victor Papanek, the great American designer, once immortality described as, “persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others who don’t care.”
A bewildering array of interventions to course-correct these trends are urgently needed, from treaties to leave fossil fuels in the ground and policies to prevent kleptocratic large-scale tax avoidance by billionaires.
But if a single thing is required to create conditions in which such steps can be properly discussed and advanced, it is the protection and expansions of media platforms and information systems that are not privately owned, are free from commercial interests, and independent of advertising revenue.
Backlash
Although this coalition of elite influence exercising its vested interests can seem overwhelming, it does face vulnerabilities.
The costs of oil and gas extraction are growing inexorably at the same time as renewables are becoming cheaper and the green economy is growing, the latter becoming more important as an employer and therefore harder to sideline.
Similarly, the impacts of global heating and concern about the climate are growing, as is awareness of the deep inequality at the heart of the problem. Rightly, critical gazes fall more and more on the private jets and super yachts.
There is a growing political and cultural backlash against AI stealing not just the jobs, but the mental health and cognitive skills of a younger generation, not to mention the intellectual property of writers, artists and musicians.
Attention
There is momentum building to establish an internationally recognised ‘AI free’ label for products and services that are authentically human-made, not mediated by AI. Signs and labels are already being used to identify AI-free books, films and websites include, "Proudly Human", "Human-made", “No A.I".
The energy and water costs of data centres also draw negative attention as does the abusive hostility experienced by many online. A significant threat to the economy looms too in an AI-linked threat of a stock market crash.
At the same time the mood of docile acceptance that the nature and shape of the online world, however harmful, is inevitable and cannot be challenged has shifted. In March 2026 the technology giants Meta and Google were found guilty of ‘intentionally built addictive social media platforms’ that were damaging to young people’s mental health.
As banal as it may seem, the driver of building these addictive forms of social media was to capture and hold the attention of people for the purpose of putting revenue raising advertising in front of them.
Blink
Advertising is found to be the dark force lurking behind the scene, catalyst for the design of the addiction engines, the price of which is seen in both mental health and climate-polluting overconsumption.
The future therefore is not smooth for cyber and polluter elites. Those arguing to break their stranglehold on politics have a popular agenda to invoke: jobs, clean air, lower bills, more comfortable homes, technologies better controlled to benefit quality of life and mental health, plus a stronger foundation for international peace.
Standing in the way of this better world is the wealth, exorbitant privilege, media and political control of a very small minority. But the game and its internal connections are increasingly ‘seen’.
The irony is that if this wealthy, influential few continue to create their elite hellscape, they will find themselves living in its rubble too, with possibly only a stair climbing, robot vacuum cleaner, with its battery on the blink, for company.
READ: POLLUTER AND CYBER ELITES PART 1.
This Author
Andrew Simms is co-director of the New Weather Institute, assistant director of Scientists for Global Responsibility, co-founder of the Badvertising campaign, an author on new and green economics, joint proposer of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, and co-author of the original Green New Deal. Follow on Bluesky @andrewsimms.bsky.social.
These two articles are published with permission from the forthcoming Responsible Science Journal 2026, a publication of Scientists for Global Responsibility.
