Report: Microsoft's Bing Could Be Censoring Search Results For U.S. Chinese Speakers As If They Were In China

Censorship watchdogs have grown concerned that Microsoft Bing could be filtering its Chinese-language search results for people in the U.S. in much the same way it censors the Internet inside of China.

China is known to heavily monitor and limit access to websites and information over the Internet for its citizens, a program some people call the Great Firewall of China.

Now tests by a Chinese censorship watchdog blog (Greatfire.org) and Dominic Rushe at the Guardian indicate that when you search for topics from the U.S. in the Chinese language, Bing could be delivering politically filtered results.

As the Guardian describes:

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 US for English and Chinese language searches on a series of controversial terms.

...

A Chinese language search for the Dalai Lama (????) on Bing is lead by a link to information on a documentary compiled by CCTV, China's state-owned broadcaster. This is followed by two entries from Baidu Baike, China's heavily censored Wikipedia rival run by the search engine Baidu. The results are similar on Yahoo, whose search is powered by Bing.

The Guardian tried various other searches for content that is censored in China and the same test with Google. Google apparently passed the non-censorship test, and showed similar results in English and Chinese.

If Microsoft really is returning filtered searches outside of China, the question is why. It seems likely that this has more to do with some kind of technical issue than a political one, where Microsoft is for some reason sending Chinese speakers to its Chinese search site when they type in Chinese. We've reached out to Microsoft for comment.