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Bing Censoring Chinese Language Search Results For Users In the US
kc123 sends this report from The Guardian:
"Microsoft's search engine Bing appears to be censoring information for Chinese language users in the U.S. in the same way it filters results in mainland China. Searches first conducted by anti-censorship campaigners at FreeWeibo, a tool that allows uncensored search of Chinese blogs, found that Bing returns radically different results in the U.S. for English and Chinese language searches on a series of controversial terms. These include Dalai Lama, June 4 incident (how the Chinese refer to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989), Falun Gong and FreeGate, a popular internet workaround for government censorship."
Direct intervention, or chilling effect?
I wonder how long it has been going on.
I guess it's to counter people in mainland china who use VPN but don't have a good understanding of any other language?
You've made your point. They'll either choose to listen to you or ignore you from now on.
So please, shut the hell up already. You're only annoying the people who support you at this point. TPTB have long since moved on.
So if i'm searching from outside China but in Chinese, perhaps I'm *really* searching from within China via a VPN? Let's take no chances....
Having Bing automatically censor all Chinese language searches is a good business move. >93% of users of the Chinese Language live in the PRC, so why bother with the complexity of making an uncensored search engine?
What governmental model does a corporation represent? I've always seen the corps at best as a communist state. At worst, a personality cult.
All 7 users!
Table-ized A.I.
They find searches based on what people click on when they search things.
If chinese language users in the filtered system can't see those links then they will have a lower rank if that search system is combined with the unfiltered system.
Therefore, the real solution is to compartmentalize the two lists rather then combining them.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Mainlanders just need to learn to search in Traditional Chinese instead of Simplified Chinese.
that their click metrics are being tracked worldwide and grouped by language? So because 1 billion chinese are censored they most likely click the uncensored/approved links (since they can't see the other ones) and skew the sorting for anyone else using the chinese language version?
Just a thought, maybe someone knows a little more about what they actually track.
As a people we really suck. We will lose our position in the world and we deserve to.
All search engines should just let all the search results show and let the user decide what he wants/ does not want to see with the use of filters, etc.
Any censorship of the results is clearly an attempt at mind control, a prime example being censoring all bad news relating to a country to make it come up smelling like roses.
Yet another reason to avoid Bing like plague.
Mickeysoft does for China and the PLA what it does for Uncle Sam and the NSA. Bend over, give them anything they want, and give them a booklet to help them help themselves, and censor whatever they want. According to Mickeysoft, the customer is very strictly the one who pays, and 'user' is not necessarily 'customer'.
Bing has a different index for each language. If you compare any two languages on Bing the results and cached version are different
Too many dongs.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
And it's little dog too
You don't remember bing?? Because it sure as heckfire remembers you!
BING!
Am I right? Or am I right or am I right?
BING!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Well, don't get Microfucked by Micro$oft.
Don't think you get it. If beta continues this crap will just continue until the site is dead. There are many people that feel burned by DICE and will not want slashdot to have any success after announcing they don't care about the community.
Who really expected Bing to above such things?
The article only gives Simplified Chinese examples, but is this happening to Traditional Chinese searches too? The two are machine translatable (except probably for one or two characters) so I would not be surprised if search engines simplified things by converting to one or the other before doing a search. So I suspect both.
Which is kinda huge. It's not just Chinese searches from the US or any other country, what about searches from Hong Kong and Taiwan, which use Traditional? Censoring on behalf of the Communist Government in these places would seriously be looked down on.
And what about Singapore which uses Simplified Chinese? I don't imagine they will be pleased to suffer Mainland censorship either.
I sure hope it's just a glitch. Probably not Microsoft automatically kowtowing to China. Probably.
Right up the wazoo.
The anti-slashdot beta protest has already come and gone. It's a done deal, they were not successful, and the remaining vulgar protestors will soon enough be dealt with as spam is on any site, ie rendered invisible.
The next battle will be building traffic to make up for the users who left.
that there really might be somebody out there who is actually using BING. Never met any such creature in real life though
You mean Tiananmen Square MASSACRE, right?
bye bye slashdot
if you guys keep this BETA shit up i wont be coming back.
Don't get Bingled.
Microsoft search always did this, and this has been reported before. This blog post is from 2009.
To make it clear that Taiwan, Tibet and the Senkaku islands are not included of course...if it gets on China's nerves, I'd support it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
In communist israel, you goys get shat on. Take that to your Central (west) Bank.
Israeli Nuclear Weapons, Chemical weapons, biological weapons, violations of ethics, violations of Palestinian human rights dont make the news, and dont make the Chinese search results.
Try searching for AIPAC political contributions, cronyism etc, IT WILL NOT RETURN MATCHES ON YOUR "land of the free" SEARCH ENGINE.
Score a few billion for the Chinese.
how the hell did they figure that out if it was written in Chinese?
-- 29A the number of the Beast
This just hurts China and Bing in the long run. Once people realize that searches in Chinese return incomplete and less reliable results, they'll do their searches in some other language with some other engine. English, for instance, with DuckDuckGo or Google.
This makes perfect sense. The Chinese government claims to represent all Chinese peoples where ever they are, a logical extension of this policy is juristiction. I would not be surprised if we found that Microsoft has its Chinese language search engine results linked to their presence in the Chinese market. In other words they are being blackmailed to censor all their search results as if they were in China when dealing with Chinese. It's too bad the US has reduced the internet to a state of nature as we have no leverage with which to counter this. Get ready folks, there'll be more of this to come.
Bing users...living in the U.S....who speak Chinese and no English. This has got to affecting a massive amount of users.
"Oh, what sad times these are when passing ruffians can say 'ni' to helpless old ladies."