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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?
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.
Sounds like they are probably just slacking on their locale detection. I bet the browser is sending something like just the two letter language code "zh" (Chinese) in the Accepts-Language header, and bing is falling back on "zh-CN" (instead of "zh-US").
Still, seems like an awfully dumb way to censor search results, not to mention the chilling effect. Kinda puts their "Scroogled" campaign in context.
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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.
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.
I have a hard time believing that the Chinese government would accept locale based filtering like that. It would be too easy to evade.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
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.
It should be clear to anyone that does any critical thinking. That is a vice that too few of my critics engage in. You should try it some time.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
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'.
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!
Google can use the term "bingled!" in their ads maybe
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.
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?
On the other hand, Chinese readers/writers here are probably communicating with Chinese there. It makes sense that treasonous Microsoft works hard kissing Chinas ass. China says jump and Gates Co. says how high?.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Not saying it's the only thing the Chinese use, but it looks (based on this mess up by MS) to be at least one of the things they use. At least that's how it appears to me. Perhaps the great firewall re-wites Accepts-Lang headers. I am just guessing though.
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Microsoft search always did this, and this has been reported before. This blog post is from 2009.
In my experience, you're more likely to get Megafucked by Microsoft.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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
how the hell did they figure that out if it was written in Chinese?
-- 29A the number of the Beast
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."
And who the bleep cares about what the Chinese government thinks when searching the web from the US? They can run things within their own borders, but a Chinese-speaking US citizen in the US is not under their jurisdiction in the slightest. Are you next going to argue that searches in English should be regulated by English law?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I would say they ARE afraid of the government and therefore jump,loss of profit is the motivation for the fear.
The Chinese govt seems to be able to invalidate intellectual property on their whim.
Microsoft is in a permanent crouching position, awaiting the call to jump.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!