Microsoft blames 'system error' but denies censoring Chinese search results

Tech giant denies Bing censorship and puts blame on technical problem but activists say Microsoft’s claims ‘simply not true’

Dominic Rushe

A Chinese language search for 'Dalai Lama' in the US returned radically different results from an English-language search. Photograph: Utpal Baruah/Reuters

Microsoft has blamed an “error in our system” for producing results on its Bing search engine that appear to censor information for Chinese language users in the same way it filters results in mainland China.

The admission is an embarrassment for Microsoft, which is making a major push to expand its business in China and has just appointed a new CEO, Satya Nadella, who has been a public critic of government surveillance in the US.

On Tuesday, campaigners at FreeWeibo, a tool that allows uncensored search of Chinese blogs, revealed that Bing returns radically different results in the US for English and simplified Chinese language searches on a series of controversial terms, including “Dalai Lama”, “June 4 incident” (how Chinese people refer to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989) and “Bo Xilai”, the former high-flying government official now serving life in prison for corruption.

After initially declining to comment, Microsoft’s Stefan Weitz, a senior director at Bing, issued a statement denying censorship. Weitz said Microsoft had conducted an investigation into the discrepancies.

“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,” he wrote.

FreeWeibo’s homepage was also removed for Chinese language users. Weitz said the site had been cut because “at some time in the past the page was marked as inappropriate due to low quality or adult content.” Weitz said it had now been restored.

Charlie Smith at FreeWeibo said Weitz’s explanation was “simply not true that the results ‘are and were unaltered outside of China’.”

Smith said: “Anybody, anywhere, can run independent tests themselves to verify our claims and see that Microsoft is quite simply trying to cover up their complicit involvement in China’s attempts to cleanse the web of any negative information about the Middle Kingdom.”

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/12/microsoft-bing-censor-chinese-search-results-system-error