Hacker News with Generative AI: Censorship

Elon Musk Says He'll 'Fix' Community Notes on X After It Disagreed with Him (gizmodo.com)
Elon Musk is not happy with Community Notes, the crowdsourced fact-checking program that adds notes to correct misinformation on his social media platform X. And the billionaire says he’s now going to “fix” Community Notes so that it agrees with him, claiming without evidence that it’s being manipulated by governments and the media.

Social Media, Elon Musk, Misinformation, Censorship

22 points by nickthegreek 48 minutes ago | 6 comments

Obscura VPN – Privacy that's more than a promise (obscura.net)
Meet Obscura: the first VPN that can’t log your activity and outsmarts internet censorship.

Privacy, VPN, Censorship

209 points by lostin01010101 18 hours ago | 143 comments

Perplexity claims to have purged Chinese censorship from its new DeepSeek clone (sherwood.news)
Perplexity claims to have purged Chinese censorship and propaganda from its new DeepSeek clone

Artificial Intelligence, Search Engines, Censorship

6 points by speckx 23 hours ago | 0 comments

Show HN: share Signal links on X without getting censored (vercel.app)
Twitter is blocking links to Signal. Use this tool to circumvent that.

Social Media, Privacy, Censorship, Twitter

10 points by rpastuszak 3 days ago | 0 comments

XAI told me I either had to delete the post, or face being fired (twitter.com)

Artificial Intelligence, Social Media, Censorship, Employment

26 points by weinzierl 3 days ago | 19 comments

X users are unable to post “Signal.me” links (disruptionist.com)
Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, is currently banning links to “Signal.me,” a URL used by the encrypted messaging service Signal.

Social Media, Censorship, Elon Musk, Signal

780 points by confusing3478 3 days ago | 747 comments

Google facilitated Russia and China's censorship requests (theguardian.com)
An investigation has exposed the tech firm’s cooperation with autocratic regimes to remove unfavourable content

Google, Censorship, Russia, China, Politics

30 points by m1 5 days ago | 8 comments

A woman made her AI voice clone say "arse." Then she got banned (technologyreview.com)
People with motor neuron disease should be allowed to say whatever they want, including “arse” and “knickers.”

AI, Ethics, Censorship, Language Models

55 points by impish9208 6 days ago | 64 comments

Centrefolded: Japan's 'porn disposal' boxes phased out amid rise of the internet (theguardian.com)
For more than a decade Kazuhide Inoue has played an understated part in protecting the morals of adolescents in Fukuoka. Several times a year, the 73-year-old visits eight white “post boxes” installed in the city in western Japan, turns a key and empties their contents. On a recent visit, his haul totalled 16 books and 81 DVDs in a single day.

Social Issues, Japan, Culture, Censorship, Pornography

8 points by c420 7 days ago | 0 comments

Google Maps Admits Deleting Critical 'Gulf of America' Reviews (forbes.com)
Google has tacitly admitted to removing negative reviews objecting to the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America from Google Maps. It has also turned off the ability to suggest edits or report inaccuracies for the Gulf of America.

Google Maps, Censorship, Geography, Controversy

19 points by nickcotter 7 days ago | 15 comments

The List of Trump's Forbidden Words That Will Get Your Paper Flagged at NSF (gizmodo.com)
Every federal agency in the U.S. is currently trying to figure out how to purge forbidden words from documents posted online, in a desperate attempt to comply with President Donald Trump’s executive order to purge “DEI” from every facet of American life.

Politics, Government, Censorship, Language

17 points by cratermoon 9 days ago | 2 comments

Turns out there's a lot of hardcore porn on Australian government websites (crikey.com.au)
Crikey looks a little different. Learn more.

Australia, Government, Pornography, Censorship

4 points by defrost 10 days ago | 0 comments

Bank CEO: Retract your debanking piece? Me: No (kalzumeus.com)
Nathan McCauley, the CEO of Anchorage Labs, Inc. d/b/a Anchorage Digital, and a board member (and, on faith and belief, CEO) of a federally chartered bank, has requested a retraction of the piece Debanking (and Debunking?). He alleges inaccuracies, misleading statements, omission of key facts, and other improprieties.

Finance, Banking, Media, Censorship

282 points by feross 10 days ago | 75 comments

The NSA's "Big Delete" (popular.info)
Today, the National Security Agency (NSA) is planning a "Big Delete" of websites and internal network content that contain any of 27 banned words, including "privilege," "bias," and "inclusion."

National Security, Censorship, Politics, Government, Surveillance

18 points by sundaeofshock 10 days ago | 3 comments

Ask HN: Why does DeepSeek delete any serious discussion about China? (ycombinator.com)
Ask HN: Why does DeepSeek delete any serious discussion about China?

China, Censorship, Social Media, Online Discussion

11 points by jerawaj740 11 days ago | 5 comments

How to Comply with the UK's Online Safety Act; Block the UK (geoblockthe.uk)
The UK's Online Safety Act requires operators of "user to user services" to read through hundreds (if not thousands) of pages of documentation to attempt to craft "meaningful" risk assessments and 'child access assessments' or face £18,000,000 fines, even imprisonment.

UK Law, Online Safety, Censorship, Geoblocking

18 points by Jigsy 12 days ago | 0 comments

Ask HN: why are posts about Elon Musk and DOGE getting quickly flagged? (ycombinator.com)
This is worrying. Clearly a large part of this community is insterested in burying relevant and potentially criminal behaviour by the tech elite.

Social Media, Censorship, Elon Musk, Cryptocurrency, Dogecoin

45 points by camillomiller 12 days ago | 41 comments

Copilot stops working on code that contains hardcoded banned words from GitHub (2023) (github.com/orgs)
Copilot purposely stops working on code that contains hardcoded banned words from Github, such as gender or sex.

AI, Code Generation, GitHub, Censorship, Programming

226 points by lknik 13 days ago | 99 comments

Government agency removes spoon emoji from work platform amid protests (techcrunch.com)
According to a New York Times report, on Thursday, the U.S. government’s General Services Administration (GSA) removed the spoon emoji as an option that users of its videoconferencing platform can select to express themselves.

Government, Technology, Social Media, Censorship, Emoji

7 points by impish9208 14 days ago | 0 comments

Tell HN: Cloudflare is blocking Pale Moon and other non-mainstream browsers (ycombinator.com)
Cloudflare's Browser Intergrity Check/Verification/Challenge feature used by many websites, is denying access to users of non-mainstream browsers like Pale Moon.

Privacy, Web Browsing, Security, Technology, Censorship

1343 points by Hold-And-Modify 15 days ago | 524 comments

Project 2025 Creators Dox Wikipedia Editors. The Tool They're Using. Horrifying (slate.com)
Last month, the Jewish-American news site Forward reported a shocking scoop: The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, is planning to “identify and target” Wikipedia editors.

Wikipedia, Politics, Censorship

16 points by schalkneethling 15 days ago | 1 comments

Reddit community banned as user spat with Musk intensifies (bbc.com)
Reddit has temporarily banned one of its communities - and removed another - after X owner Elon Musk claimed comments made by the site's users about his employees were breaking the law.

Social Media, Censorship, Elon Musk, Reddit

15 points by vinni2 15 days ago | 1 comments

Reddit is mass purging NSFW subs (reddit.com)
r/rule34 has been banned

Reddit, Censorship, NSFW Content, Community Moderation

35 points by morkalork 15 days ago | 14 comments

Streisand Effect (wikipedia.org)
The Streisand effect is an unintended consequence of attempts to hide, remove, or censor information, where the effort instead increases public awareness of the information.

Censorship, Information Control, Public Awareness, Internet Culture

5 points by yagizdegirmenci 17 days ago | 0 comments

Ask HN: Is Hacker News Being Manipulated? (ycombinator.com)
I'm all for keeping the discourse on HackerNews tight, but lately I see dozens of posts a day about serious issues for all of us being flagged.

Hacker News, Censorship, Community, Moderation

59 points by ddxv 17 days ago | 41 comments

Our channel on YouTube has been deleted due to “spam and deceptive policies” (bsky.app)

YouTube, Censorship, Social Media

381 points by richrichardsson 17 days ago | 111 comments

Ask HN: What's with flagging articles criticizing Musk? (ycombinator.com)
Can someone explain what is going on with this? Some recent examples:

Elon Musk, Censorship, Social Media, Hacker News

55 points by lnkl 18 days ago | 50 comments

CDC: Unpublished manuscripts mentioning certain topics must be pulled or revised (insidemedicine.substack.com)
The CDC has instructed its scientists to retract or pause the publication of any research manuscript being considered by any medical or scientific journal, not merely its own internal periodicals, Inside Medicine has learned.

Science, Health, Censorship, Government Regulation, Medical Research

844 points by KittenInABox 19 days ago | 721 comments

The Slop Society (wheresyoured.at)
In the last week we've seen the emergence of the true Meta — and the true Mark Zuckerberg — as the company ended its fact-checking program, claiming that (and I quote) "fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created" on both Instagram and Facebook, the latter of which was shown in a study from George Washington University to, by design, "afford antivaccine content producers several means to circumvent the intent of misinformation removal