Bing Censoring Chinese Language Search Results For Users In the US 100
kc123 sends this report from The Guardian:
"Microsoft's search engine Bing appears to be censoring information for Chinese language users in the U.S. in the same way it filters results in mainland China. Searches first conducted by anti-censorship campaigners at FreeWeibo, a tool that allows uncensored search of Chinese blogs, found that Bing returns radically different results in the U.S. for English and Chinese language searches on a series of controversial terms. These include Dalai Lama, June 4 incident (how the Chinese refer to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989), Falun Gong and FreeGate, a popular internet workaround for government censorship."
Re:Intentional? (Score:5, Insightful)
Direct intervention, or chilling effect?
This looks like an unfortunate situation where laziness, malice, and greed all point in the same direction... If the bulk of your Chinese language search results need to be delivered censored, it's presumably easier to just prune your Chinese language search archive rather than burning CPU time censoring on the fly. If Chinese officials are vexed at locals just hitting a proxy and getting uncensored search results, they probably won't exactly discourage you from adopting such a harmonious and efficient practice. And, if MS wants Bing to not get crushed, with a little help from periodic great-firewallings, making themselves helpful to local authorities is a logical move.
Re:Pretty tired of all this censorship, really. (Score:5, Insightful)
Hint: Google is probably more filtered because it is more successful, everyone knows what Google is --- most non-nerds people probably don't know what Bing is.
Re:it's just cheaper (Score:4, Insightful)
Because 7% of a billion is still 70 million potential users?