Researchers Find Microsoft's Bing May Be Censoring Search Results On China's Dissidents

Microsoft may be censoring search results on search engine Bing for political dissidents in China but also in the U.S. itself, according to a new report from the University of Toronto.

On Thursday, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab published an analysis that found that search results for Bing’s autofill system, which offers guesses on what users are searching for after a few keystrokes, often fell short of connecting a user to names of Chinese dissidents opposed to the current government. The results did not appear for several figures or government ones like President Xi Jinping in either English or Chinese.

According to the report, these names were discoverable over Bing in the past but they detected what they said was an "overwhelming censorship" of Chinese names related to China's politics.

“We consistently found that Bing censors politically sensitive Chinese names,” the report said.

This would not be the first time that Microsoft has seemingly engaged in some censorship of Chinese figures or critics in order to comply with China’s local laws on the matter.

Last December, the company halted its autofill feature for Bing inside China itself after coming under pressure from Chinese regulators. Users also noted that search results on Bing for iconic images like the Tiananmen Square “Tank Man” from 1989 returned no hits, something Microsoft explained as being the result of human error rather than active censorship.

Meanwhile, academics and journalists in China reported their LinkedIn accounts were blocked because they allegedly violated Chinese laws. Last September, an Axios journalist who focused on China found that her account was blocked for including unspecified “prohibited content” in her profile summary. Two other prominent independent journalists in China also found their accounts blocked for similar reasons.

These moves attracted scrutiny from Congress. After news broke that LinkedIn was blocking American journalists on China, Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., wrote a letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky with accusations of "gross appeasement" of Beijing.

After the Citizen Lab report was published, Microsoft said it had already addressed the issue, which it referred to as the result of a technical error.

“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 in a statement to LinkedIn.