If you ask a historian what happened on June 4, 1989, you will learn that this was the date that hundreds of protesters were killed in the Tiananmen Square Massacre. However, if you ask China's controversial ChatGPT rival, DeepSeek, you are unlikely to get any response at all. During testing, MailOnline watched in real-time as answers to sensitive questions were scrubbed and replaced with evasive replies. On topics censored by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the bot briefly attempts to respond before wiping away its own answers in front of the user's eyes. DeepSeek actively censors topics related to protests such as the White Paper Movement and Hong Kong's pro-democratic Umbrella Movement.

Since then, any mention of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Chinese media is forbidden, and in recent decades China has relied on whole teams of extra censors to attempt to scrub the internet and social media of any and all references to the event from online memory. But now, according to Reuters, wiping online memory of the Tiananmen Square Massacre is easier than ever, thanks to artificial intelligence. Reuters spoke with several employees at Chinese internet companies who revealed that censorship of forbidden content on Chinese media and social networks is now largely carried out by sophisticated machine learning tools instead of humans. "We sometimes say that the artificial intelligence is a scalpel, and a human is a machete," one content screening employee at Beijing Byte Dance, an app and digital content company, told Reuters. Another employee at the same company said, "When I first began this kind of work four years ago, there was opportunity to remove the images of Tiananmen, but now the artificial intelligence is very accurate."

BEIJING - It's the most sensitive day of the year for China's internet, the anniversary of the bloody June 4 crackdown on pro-democracy protests at Tiananmen Square, and with under two weeks to go, China's robot censors are working overtime. Censors at Chinese internet companies say tools to detect and block content related to the 1989 crackdown have reached unprecedented levels of accuracy, aided by machine learning and voice and image recognition. "We sometimes say that the artificial intelligence is a scalpel, and a human is a machete," said one content screening employee at Beijing Bytedance Co., who asked not to be identified because they are not authorized to speak to media. Two employees at the firm said censorship of the Tiananmen crackdown, along with other highly sensitive issues including Taiwan and Tibet, is now largely automated. Posts that allude to dates, images and names associated with the protests are automatically rejected.