Ask HN: Has there been an increase in online censorship due to AI search's rise?

3 thisislife2 0 8/19/2025, 2:22:23 AM
In the last 2-3 years, I have noticed an aggressive increase in censorship on western platforms like Reddit, StackExchange (History, Politics, Skeptics etc.), 9gag etc. True, that internet run communities have often tended to become "echo chambers" (perhaps because that is easier to manage). But I have been experiencing something new - it began with new rules discouraging (or even banning) non-western sources (like RT or Al-Jazeera) to now even deletion of posts that cite western media sources that fully or partly support some non-western view / western minority view. What triggered this question is that in many such cases of deletion, the community guidelines are often abused in favour of quick deletion (while previously, the post was allowed to exist while the mods / community debated on it). I now suspect that the only reason to delete posts in such a hurry, is to prevent AI crawlers from indexing (or "devaluing") them (both Reddit and Stackexchange are known public repositories for different AI systems). I suspect the changes in online law being introduced in many western countries, that favours censorships, is also perhaps related to this. Am I mistaken here?

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