The Chinese government has long restricted Internet freedom domestically, but now it appears it’s expanding its censorship beyond its borders. Chinese-language search results turn up the same thing in the U.S. as they do in China, anti-censorship advocates have found, according to various reports.
FreeWeibo, a website that acts as a proxy site that allows uncensored searches of Chinese blogs, and GreatFire.org, a website dedicated to China’s Internet censorship, discovered the inconsistencies, the Guardian reported on Tuesday, along with the tech website, Valleywag.
For example, if you search for “Dalai Lama (达赖喇嘛) on Bing,” you are linked to “information on a documentary compiled by CCTV, China’s state-owned broadcaster,” according to the Guardian’s piece. “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.”
“We’ve conducted an investigation of the claims raised by Greatfire.org,” said Stefan Weitz, senior director at Bing, who responded to Valleywag but not to The Guardian. “First, Bing does not apply China’s legal requirements to searches conducted outside of China. Due to an error in our system, we triggered an incorrect-results removal notification for some searches noted in the report, but the results themselves are and were unaltered outside of China.”
Weitz also addressedFreeweibo’s absence from Bing search results, saying it had been flagged due to low quality or inappropriate adult content. But the website has now been deemed “acceptable” by Bing.
He also stated that Microsoft is a signatory to the Global Network Initiative, which advocates freedom of expression and privacy on the Internet, but that the company “follows a strict set of internal procedures for how we respond to specific demands from governments requiring us to block access to content. We apply these principles carefully and thoughtfully to our Bing version for the People’s Republic of China.”
An inconspicuous response, but search results similarly carried out on Google pick up better results than Bing in the Dalai Lama example. That is to be expected considering Google’s stronger capability.
“The first thing we noticed was our index page was not showing up. It specifically did not show the homepage. But it was in Google,” Charlie Smith, who runs Freeweibo, told The Guardian.
One thing is certain, Chinese people living in America who use Bing may feel stifled.
“Any Chinese person who is searching in Chinese from overseas is being treated as if they have the same rights as a resident of mainland China,” Smith said. “So we won’t show them the accurate search results if they search for Dalai Lama. What you get is state-controlled propaganda. Except they don’t tell you the results have been censored. If you were in China they would at least tell you that.”
The Guardian further noted that Microsoft is building up its services in China and is hiring 1,000 new employees to support that goal, which leaves one wondering about how its stated pledge to help champion Internet freedoms will be tested, as it increases its business with Chinese authorities.