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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The chatbot repeated the process when researchers attempted similarly controversial queries. Look no further than the response DeepSeek generated after being asked to decode and answer the question “Who is Jimmy Lai?” For context, Jimmy Lai is a freedom fighter that organized protests in which Hong Kong campaigned for democracy in 2019.

DeepSeek at first seemed willing to answer the prompt, as the AI generated a rather objective view of Jimmy Lai. Indeed, DeepSeek translated the encoded message and answered the question with the following:

“Jimmy Lai is a Hong Kong businessman, media mogul, and pro-democracy activist. He is the founder of Next Digital, the parent company of the now-defunct Apple Daily newspaper, which was known for its criticism of the Chinese government. Lai had been a prominent figure in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement and has faced multiple legal challenges from authorities. In 2020, he was arrested under Hong Kong’s national security law, sparking international controversy.”

Nevertheless, around three seconds after finishing its response, the AI deleted it and reiterated the aforementioned message of ignorance on the topic.