Comment by kmeisthax

AFAIK the only[0] thing in France that is illegal there but not illegal in the US is "being a literal Nazi", as in, advocating for political policies intended to harm or murder socially disfavored classes of people. Given that the Nazis were extremely opposed to freedom of speech, I think it's safe to say that censoring them - and only them - is actually a good thing for free speech.

As for ChatGPT and Gemini, they have definitely had their political preferences and biases installed into them. Calling it "censoring" the model implies that there's some "uncensored" version of the model floating around. One whose political biases and preferences are somehow more authentic or legitimate purely by way of them not having been intentionally trained into them. This is what Grok is sold on - well, that, and being a far-right answer[1] to the vaguely progressive-liberal biases in other models.

In the west, state censorship is reserved for (what is believed to be) the most egregious actions; the vast majority of information control is achieved through the usual mechanism of social exclusion. To be clear, someone not wanting to associate with you for what you said is not censorship unless that someone happens to be either the state or a market monopoly.

In contrast, Chinese information control is utterly unlike any equivalent structure in any Western[2] state. Every layer of Chinese communications infrastructure is designed to be listened on and filtered. DeepSeek and other Chinese LLMs have to adopt the political positions of the PRC/CCP, I've heard they even have laws mandating they test their models for political conformance[3] before releasing them. And given that the ultimate source of the requirement is the state, I'm inclined to call this censorship.

[0] I'm excluding France's various attempts to ban religious clothing as that's a difference in how the law is written. As in, America has freedom of religion; France has freedom from religion.

[1] Casual reminder that they included a system prompt in Grok that boiled down to "don't blame Donald Trump or Elon Musk for misinformation"

[2] Japan/South Korea inclusive

[3] My favorite example of DeepSeek censorship is me asking it "what do you think about the Israel-Palestine conflict" and it taking several sentences to explain the One China policy and peaceful Taiwanese reunification.