Native speaker here. My guess is that the censor is not "directly" banning letter "N", but rather, this was a result of some machine learning algorithm that rec

Native speaker here. My guess is that the censor is not "directly" banning letter "N", but rather, this was a result of some machine learning algorithm that recognizes "N" as part of phrases or sentences that have a high probability of containing other banned words. It is like query expansion in NLP, but in this case it has accidentally banned a word that is widely used in other context. Edit: This looks like a more reasonable explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483061, N is the 14th letter in the alphabet, referring to the 14th item in the proposed changes [1] (the change that removes term limit). [1] (Chinese) http://www.xinhuanet.com/2018-02/25/c_1122451187.htm http://www.xinhuanet.com/2018-02/25/c_1122451187.htm