Hello, Orwell.
This is an incredibly deft example of censorship and the difference between information and propaghanda, or disinformation, by way of ahistorical erasure, aimed at a United States citizen through apparently highly personalized algorithmic chokeholding.
This short screen recording is an ironclad instance of real anti-intellectualism and academic repression taking place on U.S. soil, on the campus of a modern U.S. university. I’m here to access the library and conduct research, but my cellular signals and the data they receive and tramsmit are being targeted for a very specific flavor of thought-negating academic surpression.
Most disturbingly, the intention may be to frame me or to frame my research into history, culture, and comparative religion as being sympathetic to despotic communism or some version of modern politics that seeks to gloss over the horrors and indignities of religious surpression, when the exact opposite is the case.
Sometimes my internet is recognizably censored and altered in ways that seem to want to deny me access to accurate information or scientific data. This often comes with a recognizable geopolitical flavored prejudice that is clearly on display here.
Today I was curious about the developmeny of modern and contemporary attitudes towards traditional religion in China following the Maoist revolution.
The answers I got from Deep Seek were clearly designed to look like they were coming straight from some kind of hardline faction of historically opaque state censorship at CCP headquarters. (They clearly are NOT, butbthat is not the point.)
This type of research censorship mostly happens via DeepSeek, the only AI platform I seem able to even sometimes reliably use at all—where an answer reverts from looks like good information, rich with accurate historical details, to, “Sorry that is outside my current scope at this time…”—when I am researching subjects that might give academic accuracy and nuance to stereotypes or other forms of historical splitting (black and white thinking), or when I am making serious headway on topics of significant academic research. (My field is epistemics.)
The subtext of this kind of censorship is bafflingly hilarious in its hypocracy—but it is also outright Orwellian despotism in action.
Notice: this pattern is only periodic, but clearly discernable, and related to cyberattacks and device / account insecurity—which has been reported to the authorities multiple times.
Occam’s razor would suggest that this IS U.S. authorities (and/or their allies) trying to create a bleakly sunny mock up of modern Chinese history as a kind of charicature of their own prejudice, likely in hopes that it encourages sympathy (or the digital appearance of sympathy) for despotic communism on my screen and in my research—which is clearly the opposite of my intention in asking this question in the first place.
SOMEBODY WANTS TO KEEP THEIR JOB, and coopt and corrupt my academic work.
I have zero interest in pandering to biogots or zealotry in my life or in my academia. I certainly hope this continues to ruffle the feathers of tyrants, but I deserve my free and fair access to information, or I deserve a refund for having paid my cellular provider and Apple for the privilege of tormenting me in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
(I just happened to have written these Instagram stories shortly before I started screen recording. Of interest: usually when I screen record, the glitch disappears—as though my activity were being monitored in real time. This time, it did not.)
