section_path: Concerns/Censorship
section_name: Censorship
paragraph_text: Censorship
  
  DeepSeek's compliance with Chinese government censorship policies and its data collection practices have raised concerns over information control in the model, prompting regulatory scrutiny in multiple countries.
  
  Reports indicate that it applies content moderation in accordance with the government's " public opinion guidance " regulations, limiting responses on topics such as the Tiananmen Square massacre and Taiwan's political status. DeepSeek models that have been uncensored also display a bias towards Chinese government viewpoints on controversial topics such as Xi Jinping 's human rights record and Taiwan's political status. However, users who have downloaded the models and hosted them on their own devices and servers have reported successfully removing this censorship.
  
  Some sources have observed that the official application programming interface (API) version of R1, which runs from servers located in mainland China, uses censorship mechanisms for topics considered politically sensitive for the government of China. For example, the model may initially generate answers to questions about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, persecution of Uyghurs, comparisons between Xi Jinping and Winnie the Pooh, and human rights in China, but a censorship mechanism deletes the uncensored response afterwards and replaces it with a message such as:
  
  "Sorry, that's beyond my current scope. Let's talk about something else."
  
  The censorship mechanisms and restrictions added on top of the model's output can be removed in the open-source version of the R1 model. If the " core Socialist values " defined by the Chinese Internet regulatory authorities are undermined in a response, or if a response undermining the reunification of mainland China and Taiwan is produced, the relevant response is deleted. Locally hosted instances of R1 are still occasionally reported to provide answers consistent with Chinese Communist Party propaganda narratives. When tested by NBC News, for instance, DeepSeek's R1 initially described Taiwan as "an inalienable part of China's territory", and stated:
  
  "We firmly oppose any form of ' Taiwan independence ' separatist activities and are committed to achieving the complete reunification of the motherland through peaceful means."
  
  In January 2025, however, Western researchers were able to trick DeepSeek into giving certain answers to some of these topics by requesting in its answer to swap certain letters for similar-looking numbers.