DeepSeek and the risk of suffering something worse than Chinese Communist Party censorship

This week, the Hangzhou-based artificial intelligence lab DeepSeek has made headlines.

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On Monday, DeepSeek’s free chatbot became the most downloaded app for the iPhone, overtaking ChatGPT, the popular chatbot launched in 2022 by San Francisco-based OpenAI. Some have already rushed to celebrate the superiority of the Chinese app over the American one, claiming that the Asian giant is achieving better performance with its technology.

An application characterized by censorship and propaganda of a dictatorship

Some seem to forget that the People's Republic of China is a communist dictatorship that violates the most basic human rights, imprisons political dissidents, and violates freedom of expression. The censorship prevailing in this dictatorship is also reflected in DeepSeek, which does not answer uncomfortable questions about Taiwan (the Republic of China, a democratic country harassed by the communist regime in Beijing), or questions about the Tiananmen Square massacre (perpetrated by the Beijing dictatorship against Chinese students who were calling for democratic reforms) or other issues that are uncomfortable for that dictatorship.

Furthermore, in its responses, DeepSeek acts as a propaganda channel for that dictatorship, whitewashing it and openly lying about what is happening in that country in terms of human rights. So, we are not dealing with a mere application of artificial intelligence: DeepSeek acts as a Trojan horse for a dictatorship to improve its image and increase its influence in democratic countries. At this point, it is necessary to remember that application stores such as AppStore (from Apple) and Google Play (for Android phones) have banned applications for much more trivial reasons than these, unless we consider the lack of moderation of certain networks (the reason alleged by the AppStore to ban Parler in 2021) is less serious than the use of an application by a dictatorship as a tool of censorship and propaganda.

The Chinese business network and the CPC's control over it

It is important to remember that companies based in the People's Republic of China are subject to the Communist Party (CPC), the sole party that controls this undemocratic regime. In 2019, Asia Review noted that "Tech giants such as Baidu, Tencent Holdings, Alibaba Group Holding, JD.com, Huawei Technologies, Xiaomi, Douyu, Didi Chuxing and over 1.58 million other companies have set up internal party committees." Today, the CPC is using that network of Chinese companies as the fifth column of that dictatorship in the West.

Information and China's growing control over the West

In this sense, DeepSeek is not only dangerous because of its censorship and propaganda in favor of a totalitarian regime that systematically violates human rights, but also because of the possibility that the processed information ends up in the hands of that dictatorship and is used for political, economic and military purposes. The Chinese communist dictatorship is not a country with standards comparable to those that exist in democratic countries. We have no guarantee that a Chinese company, intervened by CPC commissioners, will avoid using the information provided for such purposes, something that many users of Chinese applications such as TikTok constantly seem to ignore.

We should not trivialize the use that Chinese applications make of this information. Through DeepSeek and other applications, the Beijing dictatorship obtains the necessary resources to exercise ever greater control over the West, a control that will serve, in the medium and long term, to promote on this side of the world what is already happening under the mandate of that regime: the systematic undermining of fundamental rights, already seriously threatened by some politicians who see China as a reference to turn the State into the absolute owner of our lives, which is the old desire of those who consider themselves legitimized to abuse their power also in democratic countries.

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Photo: AFP.