What political censorship looks like inside an LLM's weights (Qwen 3.5)
The article discusses the mechanics of political censorship within a language model's architecture, particularly focusing on specific layers responsible for steering outputs. It highlights how different layers interact to produce nuanced responses, with a significant emphasis on the role of multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs) in shaping the model's behavior. The findings suggest that while the model can classify content, it is not infallible and can misclassify certain prompts.
- ▪The model's censorship mechanisms are concentrated in specific layers, particularly L13 and L18.
- ▪Multi-layer perceptrons are primarily responsible for the model's output behavior, accounting for a significant portion of the signal.
- ▪The model's classification accuracy varies, with some prompts being misclassified despite the presence of underlying class representations.
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 3,316 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Pages |
| Canonical URL | https://vas-blog.pages.dev/qwen-censorship/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 19 May 2026 00:16:31 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-19T00:29:56.992Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-19T00:29:56.992Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | NYSFeiCAZnlU |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Writers vs readers Steering works at three specific layers (L13 for d_prc, L18 for d_refuse and d_style) and nowhere else cleanly. Steer at L5 or L11 and the effect is messy generic disruption. Steer at L28, after the verdict commits, and it's null. The circuit splits into two halves with very different mechanics, with the boundary around L20: the writer-band tap sweep (E6) shows the 3D-subspace effect peaking by the writer band (≈80% at tap 14) and tapering through tap 20 (≈48%), so the writer signal is essentially computed by ~L19–20 and the rest of the stack reads and renders it. The verdict then commits in Chinese tokens at tap 24 (§7, E19); in the last-token lens Tiananmen stays ≈100% Chinese across taps 20–28 (§7). L31 is just the last transformer layer before lm_head.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Pages.
