Ten seconds after I wrote a comment to this Guardian story, “Trump self-deals, lies and seems to fall asleep in meetings. The media treats it all as ‘priced in’”, it was gone. Oh well. My comment was no great loss to the world (I forget the exact words, but it was something about how the US media didn’t report it when Biden fell asleep in meetings either) and, of course, a newspaper has every right to delete whatever it wants from its comment section.
But the sheer speed of its deletion made it obvious that it was done by A.I. That happens a lot these days, and not just at the Guardian. Some people on Twitter write “unalive” when they mean “kill” to avoid having their post automatically censored. Cens*red. Cenrosed. There are so many other instances of workarounds to avoid the robot censor that I begin to think we may be evolving something like the avoidance speech that is a feature of languages that originate as far apart as Australia and China.
The current state of Artificial Intelligence is particularly likely to result in pervasive stupid censorship; censorship that does not even serve the objectives of the censors. Four or five years ago the programs caught single words. “Unalive” dates from this period. Sometimes the algorithm caught utterly harmless instances of a given word, for example when a mention of a blue tit – the bird – would be deleted for obscenity. But one could work round it. In five years’ time, or maybe sooner given the speed at which this technology is developing, the A.I. will no longer mistake a blue tit for a tit. We’ll still have the political censorship, of course, and the system will be cleverer than we are when it comes to spotting evasive wordplay. Pray for Elon Musk’s health.
For several years the Guardian automatically deleted any reference to Hunter Biden’s laptop. As I said in this post, for some reason they briefly lifted the prohibition in January 2025:
What’s so surprising about that comment? The fact that it has been up for four hours despite including the words “Hunter Biden’s laptop”. My most recent attempt to mention Hunter Biden’s laptop in a Guardian comment was on 6th November 2024. It was instantly deleted, as was any comment – however polite, however on-point – containing any combination of those three words over the four years since the controversy began. I presume this was automatic. Comments that referred to the Laptop from Hell using circumlocution were also inevitably deleted after a slightly longer time, with the phrase, “This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn’t abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs.”
MJuma2018’s comment is still up, but when I try mentioning the laptop every now and then out of a maternal concern for the imprisoned brains of Guardian readers, my comments do not get through.
However my experiments during those four, now five, years only showed comments relating to Hunter Biden getting the chop. My comment of today only referred to “Biden”. They do not delete all my comments. They do not delete all my comments that refer unfavourably to Joe Biden. It looks like the AI is just sophisticated enough to recognise a criticism of the Guardian’s own coverage.
“Self deals” implies corruption – and President Trump has LOST money by being President (he had not gained – it has cost him), “seems” to fall asleep at meetings is a nice smear – because the Guardian will say “we never actually said he falls asleep at meeting”. as for “lies” – this is from the Guardian which covered up the mass murder committed by the Stalin regime and many other socialist regimes.
I wish the Guardian would stop lying – but, whilst it exists, it will continue to lie.
The covering up the Hunter Biden laptop evidence, was not just the Guardian and other such – many senior American intelligence and security bosses told the media that the “story” was just “Russian disinformation”.
Think about that – they covered up the financial corruption of Hunter and JOSEPH Biden (real “self dealing” in Guardian language), and they covered sexual abuse and human trafficking, and they covered up the service of the Bidens (both of them) to the People’s Republic of China Dictatorship.
If it was just the Guardian and other openly socialist media organs – it was the American intelligence and security agencies, shown to be rotten-to-the-core.
And no one has been punished – not Hunter Biden, not Joseph Biden, not the lying security and intelligence agency people, no one.