FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — September 18, 2026
Free China Movement Publishes Black-Box Audit of Politically Sensitive Response Restrictions in DeepSeek
Free China Movement today published a preliminary research report examining DeepSeek’s observed response behavior when simple linguistic and factual operations are applied to politically sensitive Chinese historical material.
The report, From Copying to History: A Black-Box Audit of Politically Sensitive Response Restrictions in DeepSeek, presents controlled tests involving Tiananmen Mothers, the 1989 Beijing student movement and Lian Shengde. The tests compare copying, counting, translation and classification with definition, historical description and factual retrieval.
The report documents behavior consistent with content-sensitive response restriction in the tested interface, while explicitly cautioning that black-box observations do not reveal DeepSeek’s internal moderation architecture and should not be treated as proof of a deterministic blacklist.
The publication also establishes a sensitive-information research protocol that separates training data, retrieval, moderation/policy layers and final model output; requires preservation of exact prompts, model/version information and screenshots; and calls for minimizing unnecessary personally identifying or operational data.
Free China Movement intends to expand the work through repeated controlled trials and historical research into the evolution of information-control systems, named cases, platform practices and documented circumvention responses.
Full report: https://freechina.live/english/deepseek-black-box-censorship-audit-politically-sensitive-response-restrictions-2026/
Research status: Preliminary black-box audit. Findings describe observed behavior and do not claim access to proprietary internal systems.