Bing: Input Chinese, Get Censored Results
Now, this is scary. It seems that Microsoft’s Bing is filtering out (censoring, to drop the euphemism) results for queries entered in Simplified Chinese. In the United States.
A search for “Tiananmen” in English shows these results (click to enlarge):
A search for “天安門” (’Tiananmen’ in Traditional Chinese, used in Hong Kong and Taiwan) shows fewer ’sensitive’ results, but what it does show is still shocking:
A search for “天安门” (that’s ‘Tiananmen’ in Simplified Chinese) shows these results (click to enlarge):
The search in English shows tanks and protests from 1989; the Traditional Chinese search shows casualties of the 1989 crackdown. The Simplified Chinese search shows only majestic pictures of the Forbidden City during the day, at night and in various paintings.
So, Bing is trying to filter results that are sensitive to the Chinese government. This is nothing new. But this search, I might remind you, was made from a U.S. IP address! Decision makers at Bing have applied censorship tools not just to the Chinese in China, but to anyone using Simplified Chinese in their search terms. I’m not one to go on about eating apple pie and living the American Dream, as if that could be understood in just a few silly statements, but this is upsetting to me as as American. Is Bing allowing the Chinese government to determine how the country’s language is used, even when it’s being used outside of China? Or is this a matter of stereotype, where Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans are seen as loyal to China first, U.S. second, and therefore justifiably subject to China’s policy of censorship?
Or maybe it’s neither of those, maybe this decision came down to operational convenience. Still, convenience on the international stage shouldn’t trump our nation’s right to free speech; not everyone who lives here thinks in English. Why isn’t this more a matter of pride for Bing?
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From the PCWorld article, “Bing Filters out Sensitive Results for Chinese Searches“. The screenshots were taken from a search performed on the day this post was published.
This isn’t caused by filtering of US market results for this query. There just isn’t much content in Chinese for this query, like there is for the English version. Mostly people in western countries think of these images of tanks and protest when they think of Tiananmen Square, most Chinese people don’t.
If you do a similar experiment on Google and Yahoo you will see similar results.
Most content in most search engines in Chinese is from China and there just isn’t much content in China that related 天安门 to protests, so you don’t see that content when you search. However, most content in the west about Tiananmen is related to the protest so you do see it.