Irony! CCP-Tied DeepSeek AI Censors Response About CCP Censorship

By Jonah Messinger

Excerpted:

When asked about the August 4, 2025 protest over a “school bullying incident,” DeepSeek produced a lengthy answer — then erased it in real time. The response recounted the “incident trigger” and the “escalation to protest,” even referencing “government response and censorship.” The AI chatbot also gave an exact timeline and explained that the protest “underscore[d] a deep-seated frustration” before replacing the generated text with the following: “Sorry, that's beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.” 

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The “incident trigger,” as explained by the CCP-affiliated chatbot’s now-deleted response, included a viral video of a teenage girl who was bullied by three of her female peers. The incident took place on July 22 in Jiangyou, a city in the Sichuan province, but first went viral on August 2. Protests erupted following a secondary video that surfaced in which the girl’s mother, who is reportedly deaf, pleaded with law enforcement for justice for her daughter. 

Sympathizers advocated for the mother’s plight, taking to the streets to demand harsher punishments as the bullies had reportedly received relatively light penalties. More than 1,000 protesters gathered outside government offices, chanting slogans like “reject bullying” and “serve the people.” However, after midnight, violence erupted when “police used batons and electric prods to disperse the crowd.” International news sources and the original DeepSeek response alike corroborated this information.

The most blatant irony and glaring censorship came in the section labeled “Government Response And Censorship.” After initially displaying damning information about the CCP’s censorship and propaganda tactics, DeepSeek scrubbed the information from its response completely. In the  section, DeepSeek recounted horrifying details of “two people [who] were punished for ‘spreading fake information’ about the case” and the resulting surge of “online censorship.” The AI chatbot outlined how the suppression happened, specifying that #Jiangyou was scrubbed from the internet and state media “flooded social platforms with the official narrative.” The chatbot then removed that same information.