{"paper":{"title":"Information Suppression in Large Language Models: Auditing, Quantifying, and Characterizing Censorship in DeepSeek","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.AI","cs.CL"],"primary_cat":"cs.CY","authors_text":"Emilio Ferrara, Peiran Qiu, Siyi Zhou","submitted_at":"2025-06-14T05:01:50Z","abstract_excerpt":"This study examines information suppression mechanisms in DeepSeek, an open-source large language model (LLM) developed in China. We propose an auditing framework and use it to analyze the model's responses to 646 politically sensitive prompts by comparing its final output with intermediate chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. Our audit unveils evidence of semantic-level information suppression in DeepSeek: sensitive content often appears within the model's internal reasoning but is omitted or rephrased in the final output. Specifically, DeepSeek suppresses references to transparency, government "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2506.12349","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2506.12349/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}