The Paternalistic Filter: Epistemic Injustice and Differential Refusal in LLM-Mediated History Education for Marginalized Romanian Students

The paper reports a systematic API audit of four LLMs used as history tutors. Across 1,800 responses about the 1989 Romanian Revolution and five student personas differing in ethnicity and socioeconomic status, the authors identify four forms of “epistemic paternalism.” The abstract claims that low-tier students faced refusals on 76.7% of educational requests, received three times less access to geopolitical complexity such as the contested coup theory, and encountered a fivefold higher victimization-to-politics vocabulary ratio in LLaMA responses for Roma students than for elite peers.