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Bing Censoring Chinese Language Search Results For Users In the US

Posted by Soulskill on from the good-thing-americans-don't-know-foreign-languages dept.

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."

3 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Intentional? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Direct intervention, or chilling effect?

    This looks like an unfortunate situation where laziness, malice, and greed all point in the same direction... If the bulk of your Chinese language search results need to be delivered censored, it's presumably easier to just prune your Chinese language search archive rather than burning CPU time censoring on the fly. If Chinese officials are vexed at locals just hitting a proxy and getting uncensored search results, they probably won't exactly discourage you from adopting such a harmonious and efficient practice. And, if MS wants Bing to not get crushed, with a little help from periodic great-firewallings, making themselves helpful to local authorities is a logical move.

  2. Re:Pretty tired of all this censorship, really. by TrollstonButterbeans · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Protip: Your search engine results are censored. (DCMA takedowns, NSA, porn filters, sites deemed infected by viruses, even -- *GASP* political filtering even in Western countries -- no kidding, various local laws that muck with search engines, stuff snuffed out by anti-terrorism laws).

    Hint: Google is probably more filtered because it is more successful, everyone knows what Google is --- most non-nerds people probably don't know what Bing is.

    --
    Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
  3. Re:it's just cheaper by Opportunist · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Because 7% of a billion is still 70 million potential users?

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.