China 📍

An uncomfortable asymmetry is buried inside the whole story. The Wall Street Journal, like most serious publications, sits behind a paywall—which is what lets us pay reporters to do the work this column rests on. Xinhua does not. People’s Daily does not. As Roberts put it: “While independent media in democracies is paywalling articles in order to sustain itself, state media in authoritarian regimes is often freely available online and easy for companies to scrape and train on.”

A separate audit in the paper widened the lens to 37 countries where a majority of speakers of a particular language live in that country. The pattern that the research team found in Chinese repeated wherever they looked: the lower a country’s press freedom, the more regime-friendly the AI’s local-language answer. China is the case study; the phenomenon is global.