DeepSeek is giving the world a window into Chinese censorship and information control
Hong Kong CNN —
Previously little-known Chinese startup DeepSeek has dominated headlines and app charts in recent days thanks to its new AI chatbot, which sparked a global tech sell-off that wiped billions off Silicon Valley’s biggest companies and shattered assumptions of America’s dominance of the tech race.
But those signing up for the chatbot and its open-source technology are being confronted with the Chinese Communist Party’s brand of censorship and information control.
Ask DeepSeek’s newest AI model, unveiled last week, to do things like explain who is winning the AI race, summarize the latest executive orders from the White House or tell a joke and a user will get similar answers to the ones spewed out by American-made rivals OpenAI’s GPT-4, Meta’s Llama or Google’s Gemini.
Yet when questions veer into territory that would be restricted or heavily moderated on China’s domestic internet, the responses reveal aspects of the country’s tight information controls.
Using the internet in the world’s second most populous country is to cross what’s often dubbed the “Great Firewall” and enter a completely separate internet eco-system policed by armies of censors, where most major Western social media and search platforms are blocked. The country routinely ranks among the most restrictive for internet and speech freedoms in reports from global watchdogs.
The international popularity of Chinese apps like TikTok and RedNote have already raised national security concerns among Western governments – as well as questions about the potential impact to free speech and Beijing’s ability to shape global narratives and public opinion.
Now, the introduction of DeepSeek’s AI assistant – which is free and rocketed to the top of