Tor is funded by the us government. Why is very unclear. They may have backdoored it. They may be using it for surveillance. They are probably not using it to disseminate propaganda (they can do that over traditional channels). However, the likeliest reason (imo) for funding tor is simply that they need it themselves. There's a famous--and possibly apocryphal--anecdote from a security researcher who met an FBI agent at defcon. The security researcher brought up tor, and the FBI agent said 'oh, yeah, we have our own anonymity network like that--except it's just for the FBI'. The security researcher was unable to explain to the FBI agent why that made no sense.