Microsoft's Bing Temporarily Blocked Searches of Tiananmen Square 'Tank Man' Image
June 04 2021 - 6:36PM
Dow Jones News
By Aaron Tilley
Microsoft Corp.'s Bing search engine blocked content in the U.S.
deemed politically sensitive to China's government on the
anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, a move the company
said was an accident that it would correct.
Bing users noted on social media Friday that U.S. searches on
the website's images and videos tabs for "Tank Man" -- the iconic
image of a man standing in front of a column of tanks after the
1989 massacre -- didn't return any hits. Searches of the same
phrase on Bing's main page, however, returned hundreds of thousands
of results.
"This is due to an accidental human error and we are actively
working to resolve this," a Microsoft representative said in a
statement Friday.
The statement comes as people on Friday marked the date in 1989
when Chinese troops around Beijing's Tiananmen Square gunned down
pro-democracy protesters.
Bing is the second-biggest search engine world-wide with a
roughly 2% market share, according to May figures from Statcounter.
Google dominates with a 92% global share of the market.
Microsoft has contended with controversy over compliance with
Chinese censorship rules before. The company, which first opened an
office in China in 1992, launched a heavily censored version of
Bing there in 2009; its LinkedIn professional network service runs
a censored version in China that has been criticized for appearing
to censor critics of China outside of the country.
In 2019, Microsoft dealt with a temporary disruption of its Bing
service in China. At the time, the company said it didn't know why
it happened, but it came as Beijing tightened its grip on the
internet and as tensions grew between the U.S. and China over trade
and technology.
Other U.S. tech companies have faced issues over censoring
content deemed to appease the Chinese government. Last year, Zoom
Video Communications Inc. drew scrutiny for shutting down a U.S.
human-rights organization's account shortly after its
videoconference on the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. U.S. federal
prosecutors went on to charge a China-based Zoom executive with
acting at the direction of Chinese law enforcement and intelligence
officials to disrupt the Tiananmen Square commemorations.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 04, 2021 18:33 ET (22:33 GMT)
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