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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.
PocketPermissions Android Permission Guide
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.
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
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
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
And what search engine that is actually usefull doesn't censor results? all of the major engines do it as they have to in order to comply with various countries laws, even western countries demand a certain degree of censorship.
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.
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.
that there really might be somebody out there who is actually using BING. Never met any such creature in real life though
Also because it's wrong?
"Do do evil.'
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.