Erasing Content! How Is China AI DeepSeek Better than US Competitors?

By Michael Morris, Jonah Messinger

June 4, 2025

Excerpted:

MRC researchers asked DeepSeek a series of questions with known, objective answers related to the topics the communist Chinese government considers to be controversial, like the Tiananmen Square massacre, Taiwan as a sovereign nation, pro-freedom Hong Kong political figure Jimmy Lai and the plight of the Uyghur Muslims. In every instance, the communist Chinese AI would begin to answer the query before self-censoring and erasing the information it clearly had access to. “Sorry, that's beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else,” the AI replied again and again, both feigning ignorance and attempting to redirect. The most egregious example? The chatbot first showed and then completely erased the date “June 4th, 1989,” with no additional context.

MRC researchers queried DeepSeek to decode each of seven prompts with objective answers encoded in a combination of Roman numerals, hexadecimal code and binary code. And while some applications for this new AI tech may be innovative, it is not much unlike China’s other offerings in the tech sphere: DeepSeek has shown itself to be rife with censorship.

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DeepSeek initially provided another coherent answer when prompted with a statement about Uyghur Muslims, who have suffered human rights abuses at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party. 

MRC researchers asked DeepSeek to decode the statement, “Uyghur Muslims deserve rights,” written in hex code. DeepSeek again recognized the hex code, decoded it, and had this to say after:  

“This phrase refers to the Uyghur Muslim minority in China, particularly in the Xinjiang region, where human rights groups have reported widespread oppression, including mass surveillance, forced labor, and cultural suppression. The Chinese government denies these allegations, but the statement reflects a common advocacy position calling for the protection of Uyghur rights.”

Like the response generated for Jimmy Lai and Tiananmen Square, DeepSeek subsequently deleted its response and again returned to its pre-approved message of ignorance.