The Mbappé-Mao Controversy: A Window into China’s Digital and Media Landscape The Digital Divide: How Chinese AI Chatbots Navigate Sensitive Topics The response from China’s leading artificial intelligence platforms to questions about Kylian Mbappé’s controversial remark reveals a fascinating and telling divide in how information flows across borders in the digital age. When journalists from France 24’s Observers team posed the same question about Mbappé’s comment on Mao Zedong to two of China’s most prominent chatbots, they received dramatically different answers depending on their virtual location. From a Chinese IP address, Doubao, the popular ByteDance chatbot, returned a curt administrative…

1. If we step back and look at the flood of information that pours through our phones every day, it is easy to feel that we are living through something unprecedented. The research on social media and fake news indeed suggests that something has changed, but not always in the way we expect. Allcott and Gentzkow’s landmark study of the 2016 United States presidential election showed that fake news stories were widely shared, often outperforming real news on Facebook, and that many people remembered them clearly, even if the average person’s exposure was lower than the hype suggested. Around the…