Censorship watchdog Greatfire.org alleged Tuesday that Microsoft’s search engine Bing was filtering Chinese-language results worldwide in the same way it censors queries from China.
According to GreatFire, "our latest research indicates that Microsoft’s search engine Bing is censoring English and Chinese language search on its home page in order to exclude certain results. We have also noticed that Bing is practicing subtle censorship with search results. In both instances, Bing is filtering out links and stories that the Chinese authorities would deem damaging".
Findings indicate that Bing had some level of censorship in place for all Chinese-language queries, regardless of location. Bing is not transparent in what is taking place either, sometimes displaying a message that “Some results have been removed”, or no notice at all, instead of the more informative “Due to legal obligations imposed by Chinese laws and regulations, we have removed specific results for these search terms” used by competitor Google.
The Guardian tested various queries that would be censored in China on both Bing and Google. Google exercised no censorship of results in Chinese, and showed similar results regardless of language.
Microsoft has denied all of GreatFire's allegations. Stefan Weitz, senior director at Bing said the search engine "does not apply China’s legal requirements to searches conducted outside of China. Due to an error in our system, we triggered an incorrect results removal notification for some searches noted in the report but the results themselves are and were unaltered outside of China."
Microsoft is part of the Global Network Initiative, a multi-stakeholder group of companies, civil society organisations, investors and academics dedicated to protecting and advancing freedom of expression and privacy on the internet. Weitz emphasized that "as part of our commitment to GNI, Microsoft follows a strict set of internal procedures for how we respond to specific demands from governments requiring us to block access to content. We apply these principles carefully and thoughtfully to our Bing version for the People’s Republic of China."
Since the original report, Bing Chinese-language queries include previously blocked ‘controversial’ search results, such as the Tiananmen Square protests.
Update: In a blog post following Microsoft's response to their findings, GreatFire points to this search query (for Freegate, a popular, Falun Gong-funded anti-censorship tool) which returns no results and the message "Due to legal obligations imposed by Chinese laws and regulations, we have removed the results for these search terms." This result appears regardless of where the user is searching from.
[Image via Bing]
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