Microsoft’s Bing Applied China’s Political Censorship to Some North American Searches, Report Says – By Ian Sherr (CNET) / May 20, 2022
The tech giant’s Bing search engine reportedly didn’t autofill search suggestions for terms the Chinese government typically censors. Microsoft said it was a misconfiguration.
Microsoft’s search engine applied Chinese-style censorship to some North American searches, according to a new report, raising questions about the tech giant’s dedication to the flow of information across the internet.
Bing’s autofill search system, which lists suggestions based on a word or the beginning letters typed into a search box, failed to work with names and terms that the Chinese government is known to find politically sensitive, according to a new report from Citizen Lab, a public interest cybersecurity group. The organization found that in December last year, people prompting searches that would suggest connections to Chinese party leaders, dissidents or other politically sensitive topics, were regularly censored.
Microsoft acknowledged and reportedly fixed the issue, telling a reporter at The Wall Street Journal that it was a technical error that had caused people outside China to be affected by settings meant for that country. “A small number of users may have experienced a misconfiguration that prevented surfacing some valid autosuggest terms, and we thank Citizen Lab for bringing this to our attention,” a Microsoft spokeswoman said, according to The Wall Street Journal. In a follow-up statement to CNET, a Microsoft spokeswoman added that the autosuggestions on Bing are “largely based on the query itself,” and so, “not seeing an autosuggestion does not mean it has been blocked.”
