The Microsoft Extension

[Randy W]

to the Great Firewall (from the Shanghaiist)

 

Bing search engine is censoring Chinese language results worldwide

 

This is either a technical glitch (i.e. Bing gleefully self-censors Chinese language results in China, and accidentally applied the same censorship to international users) or intentional, full-blown appeasement. Whether you're a resident of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, or any number of "overseas Chinese" communities, when it comes to Bing, you're a CCTV-watching, People's Daily reading, PRC citizen.

 

. . .

 

“We thought there had been a mistake so we wrote to Microsoft and they said ‘no comment,’” he said.

 

 

Microsoft, like Bloomberg a few months ago, have apparently decided that no price is too large so long as they can keep the Chinese market. The only comforting thing to acknowledge here is that nobody uses Bing anyways, and that this is about as consequential as censoring Google Plus.

 

 

[Randy W]

More from the Wall Street Journal

 

Reputation Matters: Unpacking the Microsoft China Censorship Scandal

The allegations against Microsoft came from Chinese censorship-monitoring website GreatFire, which published a report on Tuesday arguing that Microsoft was censoring searches for politically sensitive Chinese content on the international version of Bing. Testing by journalists and independent sources confirmed GreatFire’s findings: Searches for sensitive terms, including “达赖喇嘛” (Dalai Lama), and “自由微博” (FreeWeibo, a GreatFire website displaying deleted content from Chinese social media), returned filtered results and/or messages stating that results had been removed—even for users outside of China.

 

. . .

 

In this case, GreatFire was also possibly the victim of its own reputation. No one denies the group has the best interests of Chinese Internet users at heart: In just two years, it has become one of the most valued watchdogs in the China censorship community. It has advanced the level of technical knowledge about censorship in China and, more recently, offered solutions for defeating the Great Firewall. But the group has also pursued a somewhat confrontational approach to advocacy that has led to private grumblings from tech companies forced to navigate complex webs of competing interests in order to function in China.