this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
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A project called "Remove-DEI" shows the tweaks used to remove "forbidden words" from a database about childhood school readiness.

The updates, shown in Github commits, are to a database for the Department of Health and Human Services’ Head Start program. They show a project called “Remove-DEI,” which reveal some of the back-and-forth that is happening behind the scenes to align federal agencies with Donald Trump’s executive orders that forbid almost anything having to do with race or gender within federal agencies. The Github pages show software engineers discussing amongst themselves how to best remove all instances of “forbidden words” from a specific database, and the code updates they used to do it. The changes also show that, while thousands of government datasets are disappearing from the internet, even ones that remain are having parts of their utility deprecated or broken in a way that may not be visible to those outside the government.

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[–] xenomor@lemmy.world 273 points 4 months ago (27 children)

Let me get this straight. This is the “free speech absolutist” doing this, right?

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[–] stardustsystem@lemmy.world 165 points 4 months ago (4 children)

Read 1984, if you haven't already.

This is exactly what The Party does through simplifying the Newspeak dictionary - targeting words to remove from the lexicon to make even communicating against The Party's narrative impossible.

DEI is being Unpersoned

[–] latenightnoir@lemmy.world 53 points 4 months ago (1 children)

This is why it's essential, now more than ever, to keep these words and notions alive, let the truth be an act of rebellion in itself.

Life is meaningless without diversity, and it is up to each and every one of us to protect it.

[–] ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago

They usually don't care, they just claim some imaginary East-Asian country banned any kind of self-expression to the point all people are wearing the same clothes, which made crime disappear over night or some similar bullshit. They want to claim humans are not different by nature.

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[–] peaceful_world_view@lemmy.world 75 points 4 months ago (1 children)

What a waste of human endeavor.

[–] Bosht@lemmy.world 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Literally flushing money down the drain to feed ego. It's honestly pathetic and disgusting.

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[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 43 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Someone smart tell me how to take advantage of this to make the IRS forget I exist.

[–] Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee 11 points 4 months ago (1 children)

*how to make IRS forgetn't to tax the rich

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[–] socsa@piefed.social 43 points 4 months ago

Imagine being this fragile

[–] greenfish@lemmy.world 32 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm a contractor for uscis. We were ordered to change all instances of the word 'immigrant' to 'alien'. We said ok and shrugged because our systems actually use the word 'person'. They didn't say anything about that and we didn't ask

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[–] nevemsenki@lemmy.world 30 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

This level of pettiness could be amusing if it wasn't in control of the world's largest army and nuclear arsenal.

Edit: and not actively trying to murder people, now that I think about it.

[–] friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 13 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

I recently took a critical eye to the lyrics of the USA national anthem and was surprised to realize that it's basically about killing people all night long and not getting killed yourself.

It's not about equality, the American dream, honor, economic strength, ingenuity. It's about killing people with bombs. And a flag.

[–] NABDad@lemmy.world 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

To be fair, when the poem was written we were getting our asses kicked and survival was not assured.

If you look at the events of the moment, the significant part is the "not getting killed" part.

If things had gone differently, we could all be speaking English today!

[–] callouscomic@lemm.ee 7 points 4 months ago

To be fair, it wasn't even adopted as the national anthem until 1931in the middle of decades of nationalism, and hateful "patriotism" designed to force a very specific image of America that is NOT inclusive to others.

Today there are far too many morons who think so many of these oppressive things were instituted by the founders and therefore it should remain as is forever. The same assholes who think some past heyday was "better" than today.

It's up there with the pledge of allegiance, in god we trust, and various statues and shit.

Fuck these people.

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[–] ZeroGravitas@lemm.ee 23 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Apparently the new slogan is "Vox Populi No DEI".

The content filtering approach to government, or, if you will, a filterocracy.

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[–] refurbishedrefurbisher@lemmy.sdf.org 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

for f in $(find .); do sed -i 's/wokeness//g' $f; done

[–] weker01@sh.itjust.works 7 points 4 months ago (1 children)

This will break if the filename has spaces in it iirc.

[–] Jagger2097@lemmy.world 5 points 4 months ago

Regex is the real deep state

[–] WimpyWoodchuck@feddit.org 6 points 4 months ago

find -exec my dude

[–] pressanykeynow@lemmy.world 16 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Will they return the master-slave terminology? It's actually funny how the Newspeak wheel is turning.

[–] jenesaisquoi@feddit.org 5 points 4 months ago

It's called an euphemism treadmill

[–] HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com 9 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Smartest thing would be to just adjust the output so that its easily reverted.

[–] Bosht@lemmy.world 8 points 4 months ago (1 children)

This is literally what I've been doing, but there are people that are just overwriting shit.

[–] HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com 6 points 4 months ago

their idiots. if anything breaks doing something more akin to masking to nothing will make them look like a hero. doing something that can't be undone is wack.

What would happen if someone began adding banned words to important parts of a database?

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