A couple of things I tried… Please validate to tell me I’m not crazy. Searches done on www.nih.gov (linked in post).
These are blocked:
- “diversity”
- "diversity "
- “equity”
- “inclusion”
- “DEI”
These are not blocked:
- “diverse”
- “diversit”
- “diversity*”, “inclusion*”, “equity*”
- “diversitya”
- “equity and diversity”
- “diversity and equity”
- “diversity equity inclusion”
What is the meaning of this
Redirect to home page and no results. However you can still do this in Google Search, diversity site:nih.gov
“Your IP address has been traced and the NIH is on its way to assist you.”
Whoa, what the actual fuck. They are 100% doing that by choice.
For example, this comes up on duckduckgo search:
And clicking on that link suddenly gives this, as if it never existed:
To make sure this wasn’t just old search data, I went to the internet archive.
As of Jan 20th (the last archived copy), that About page was still up. So, it got taken down in the last few days.
You can say that’s a coincidence, but good luck trying to explain that among 100 other things that Nazis did these past few days.
Pretty sure they have announced they’re immediately destroying any semblance of anything DEI, so yeah
I guess they were asked to remove any reference to DEI from the website, and instead of updating millions of documents, they just blocked it from search.
They weren’t asked, they were mandated to do so directly by executive order. I get the desire to not comply, here, but if I’m NIH, I’m probably thinking that complying to keep the doors open for four years will do a hell of a lot more for the country than if they refuse and Trump totally dismantles their entire architecture with enough time that it’s difficult to reinstitute when he’s gone.
That’s what I meant, it’s the closest they can get to complying without actually complying (not to mention, it’s not really possible to go through every document and redact it within the timeframe demanded).
Yeah, I understood. My reply wasn’t actually directed at you; sorry for not being clear. I just wanted to add that bit in case other readers didn’t know that this was more forceful than a request.
The Orange is now in charge.
It’s not limited to a single Department either, here’s NASA:
Yeah no joke. The biomedical community is probably in collective ourage now, since NIH straight up cancelled most grant reviews and all types of outreach… which is unprecedented
The official NIH website banning specific words is just… cherry on the cake, I suppose. Hence only mildly infuriating
spoiler
I swear goodness this gives me way too much of the great China firewall vibe…
Welcome to totalitarian regimes.
They have to, effectively. It’s covered in one of the executive orders Trump made day 1. You can look through all of them on whitehouse.gov if you want.
DEI is explicitly prohibited in governement orgs now. And Trump has his own little personal government force to use against any that don’t play along through the DOGE project/group, headed by Musk.
I’m waiting for the word Orange to be banned by executive order.
My friend found/remembered an article from 2017, which is similar, but for the CDC. It doesn’t sound like it affected search though. http://archive.is/JLcc8
The forbidden words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”
I tried searching the terms above on NIH, and none of them, except diversity, take you back to the home page. CDC search seems unaffected currently.
It’s on our internal searches as well. Some 404’s, some “due to executive order (whatever the fuck number) this page is no longer available” message.
Yeah, the search terms seem to have an HTTP 302 redirect to the domain’s home page.
Searching for “diversityy” shows unredacted results for the word “diversity” as if it had automatically corrected the spelling, bolding the corrected search term.
