Deepseek doesn’t allow discussion of China/Chinese politics all that much. That isn’t really unique to deepseek. Social media in China tends to have rules about it too.

You have to keep in mind these services are run by companies within China. Companies that China keeps on a short leash for good reason. So the companies do this to cover their ass i think. Because if for example someone were to get Deepseek to say bad stuff about China then the CPC might come to Deepseek’s makers, and be like “Hey wtf is up with this? Are you trying to be counter-revolutionary?”

It’s hard to moderate complicated stuff like that with a fine toothed comb. Similar to how in the west a social media site will outright ban NSFW content to avoid having to moderate it to weed out CSAM from the normal stuff. It’s a wide net block to save them the headache of moderating it in more detail. And to prevent accidental slip ups.

This is a decision the company itself has made in response to much more reasonable regulations by the CPC to make sure companies are not undermining the government. That’s my take on it anyway. It’s annoying, but it’s not a huge deal imo. Not like LLMs are reliable enough to get good info from anyway. Even if they didnt block it.

Edit: Also i think the wya they implement it is they have blocked certain key words. Where if the AI thinks or write those words it blocks the prompt. I think for example it can’t talk about Xi Jinping. So if while answering it brings him up it’ll stop and give that message. I’m guessing they had issues with westerners trying to get it to say bad stuff about him so they blocked his name.