I actually think that is surprisingly in line with the development of the internet in general.

In 1960, the US military funds the internet to help spread ideas among people. There’s a fair bit of christian philosophy behind this seemingly technical development, namely that the medieval christian worldview was heavily influenced by ancient greek guy named plato, who said that “heaven” is the set of all ideas (Theory of forms), where ideas are “timeless, eternal forms” of which any real object is an instance. So it’s the set of all forms, where a form is an information construct, similar to a blueprint for how to build/do things. This obviously should be compared to the internet, which can be understood as the realm of all ideas. So, funding the internet is the practical application of philosophical concepts founded hundreds of years earlier.

According to some commentators such as Hegel (link), The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea. That means that it’s the state’s responsibility to strive towards what is ethically good, especially if individual humans or companies could not achieve those goals. So, if a bigger development is considered ethically good but too expensive to carry out by individuals, the state can finance and carry through such operations. That, in combination with the above paragraph, is why i believe that the US government had a directive to implement computing technology to improve the ethical value of the world.

Evidence that the US government did not one but multiple research programs into how to improve the performance of the human brain can be seen by research programs as diverse as MKUltra which did not only develop interrogation techniques but also researched into how drugs affect human consciousness in general and what modes of operation the brain has available. Such insights could be used to find appropriate pharmaceuticals to stimulate human brain activity towards higher performance.

Tools like the internet, which has a direct military precursor (ARPANET), could be used to speed up human information processing and sharing, which can lead people to strive for new ways of life, which can even lead to revolutions in the way of life around the world, such as in the Arab Spring movement. I would say that from the point of view of the US military, that is in general a desirable outcome.

The fact that Trump and his loyalists are now using the internet to spread ideas through the population that make them act in certain ways to change the political system in one way or another is kind of the core essence of the internet in general. The internet exists to facilitate the spread of ideas which causes people to change their way of life, and Trump and his loyalists are merely using that tool for exactly that purpose; Just that they realize that what is happening in society is not only dictated by people’s opinions being distributed but largely by political power and the ability to sway people’s opinion in one way or another based on profit motifes. I think that under the Trump administration, the internet will be a tool to make people act in line of thought with wealthy individuals who will try to profit a lot by steering society in a certain way.