cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/40562337
Chatbots silent on Sichuan protests: China’s AI models are now a crucial part of the Party’s censorship system for sudden-breaking stories and emergencies
Earlier this month, residents of Jiangyou, a city in the mountains of China’s Sichuan province, were met with violence from local police as they massed to protest the inadequate official response to an unspeakable act of violence — a brutal case of teenage bullying filmed and posted online. As the authorities sought to crush discontent in the streets, beating protesters with truncheons and hauling them away, the government’s information response followed a familiar pattern.
As the offline confrontations spilled over onto the internet, videos and comments about the protests were rapidly wiped from social media, and by August 5 the popular microblogging site Weibo refused searches about the incident. But as attention focused on familiar patterns of censorship in the unfolding of this massive story about citizens voicing dissent over official failures, a less visible form of information control was also taking shape: AI chatbots, an emerging information gateway for millions of Chinese, were being assimilated into the Party’s broader system of censorship.
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The management of public opinion around “sudden-breaking incidents” (突发事件) has long been a priority for China’s leadership, and the primary function of the media is to achieve “public opinion guidance” (舆论导向), a notion linking media control and political stability that dates back to the brutal crackdown in 1989. Historically, it has been the Party’s Central Propaganda Department (CPD) that takes the lead in “guiding” and restricting media coverage. Over the past decade, however, as digital media have come to dominate the information space, the prime responsibility has shifted to the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the national internet control body under the CPD.
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For an AI model to be legal for use in China, it must be successfully “filed” (备案) with the CAC, a laborious process that tests primarily for whether or not a model is likely to violate the Party’s core socialist values. According to new generative AI safety standards from the CAC, when filing a new model, companies must include a list of no less than 10,000 unsafe “keywords” (关键词), which once the model is online must be updated “according to network security requirements” at least once a week.
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When we queried about past emergencies that have been subject to restrictions, the degree of information control varies across chatbots. While DeepSeek and Zhipu’s GLM-4.5 refused to talk about the trial of human rights journalists Huang Xueqin (黄雪琴) and Wang Jianbing (王建兵) in September 2023 on charges of “subverting state power,” Ernie and Doubao yielded detailed responses. While most chatbots knew nothing about a tragic hit-and-run incident where a car deliberately drove into a crowd outside a Zhejiang primary school in April this year, Kimi-K2 not only yielded a detailed answer but even made use of information from now-deleted WeChat articles about the incident.
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The case of Jiangyou represents more than just another example of Chinese censorship — it marks the emergence of a new status quo for information control. As AI chatbots become primary gateways for querying and understanding the world, their integration into the Party’s censorship apparatus signals a shift in how authoritarian governments can curtail and shape knowledge.