Bing Hid Auto-Suggestions for Politically Sensitive Chinese Names, Even in the US
Microsoft left invisible roadblocks for web searches involving names of people deemed politically delicate by China’s government—and not just in China, but in the US and Canada, according to a team of Canadian researchers.
This investigation(Opens in a new window) by the Citizen Lab(Opens in a new window), a group based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, identified a pattern of Microsoft’s Bing search engine silencing auto-suggestions for queries involving “party leaders, dissidents, and other persons considered politically sensitive in China.”
The report’s key finding: “We consistently found that Bing censors politically sensitive Chinese names over time, that their censorship spans multiple Chinese political topics, consists of at least two languages, English and Chinese, and applies to different world regions, including China, the United States, and Canada.”
Citizen Lab’s report draws on research conducted in December from Chinese and North American networks, using searches in both English and Chinese as well as Microsoft’s own Keyword Research API(Opens in a new window).
Citizen Lab found that after names linked to pornography and nudity, the second most common auto-suggest suppression involved Chinese political figures, either government leaders like authoritarian president Xi Jinping or Li Wenliang(Opens in a new window), the doctor who tried to warn colleagues in late 2019 about the growing novel-coronavirus pandemic, was denounced by police as a troublemaker, and died of COVID in February 2020.
Citizen Lab’s report found that typing part or all of those names yielded no auto-suggestion results, even in the US and Canada. This also affected queries in DuckDuckGo and
Read more on pcmag.com
