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.

  • @[email protected]
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    679 hours ago

    I think you’re missing something here.

    GitHub isn’t doing anything. It’s just a repository where people can track changes that are happening by end users. The end users are using GitHub and are removing DEI stuff from their products at the direction of the US government (AKA. Musk and Trump).

    Being angry at Microsoft is like being angry at a grocery store chain because you saw a kid being told by his grandpa to feed stale bread (from that grocery store) to some ducks.

    • Maeve
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      -188 hours ago

      Maybe, I’ll reread, I’ve something to do shortly that will take most of my day but I’ll come back tonight to this. Thank you

      • @[email protected]
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        87 hours ago

        To add, GitHub is actually a great place to be making these changes, because with GitHub you retain history of the edits and prior versions. So after Trump changes his mind or loses power, the missing information can be brought back in fairly easily. Nothing is permanently lost.

        • @[email protected]
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          26 hours ago

          Missing information being brought back? Assuming they don’t destroy backups. Assuming there are backups.