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.

  • 0x0@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    3 hours ago

    The irony that the author was red scared… all this authoritarianism… certainly Trump’s a commie.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      2 hours ago

      The author was that after getting a look at how Stalin’s USSR worked.

      I think we can agree that even a marxist-themed totalitarianism in an English-speaking country is extremely unlikely to be Stalinist, thus similar to 1984.