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."
Oblig Ned Ryerson (Score:3, Funny)
You don't remember bing?? Because it sure as heckfire remembers you!
BING!
Am I right? Or am I right or am I right?
BING!
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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.
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On the other hand, Chinese readers/writers here are probably communicating with Chinese there. It makes sense that treasonous Microsoft works hard kissing Chinas ass. China says jump and Gates Co. says how high?.
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I would say they ARE afraid of the government and therefore jump,loss of profit is the motivation for the fear.
The Chinese govt seems to be able to invalidate intellectual property on their whim.
Microsoft is in a permanent crouching position, awaiting the call to jump.
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Sounds like they are probably just slacking on their locale detection. I bet the browser is sending something like just the two letter language code "zh" (Chinese) in the Accepts-Language header, and bing is falling back on "zh-CN" (instead of "zh-US").
Still, seems like an awfully dumb way to censor search results, not to mention the chilling effect. Kinda puts their "Scroogled" campaign in context.
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I have a hard time believing that the Chinese government would accept locale based filtering like that. It would be too easy to evade.
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It should be clear to anyone that does any critical thinking. That is a vice that too few of my critics engage in. You should try it some time.
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Not saying it's the only thing the Chinese use, but it looks (based on this mess up by MS) to be at least one of the things they use. At least that's how it appears to me. Perhaps the great firewall re-wites Accepts-Lang headers. I am just guessing though.
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And who the bleep cares about what the Chinese government thinks when searching the web from the US? They can run things within their own borders, but a Chinese-speaking US citizen in the US is not under their jurisdiction in the slightest. Are you next going to argue that searches in English should be regulated by English law?
Re:Intentional? (Score:5, Funny)
Google can use the term "bingled!" in their ads maybe
it's just cheaper (Score:1)
Having Bing automatically censor all Chinese language searches is a good business move. >93% of users of the Chinese Language live in the PRC, so why bother with the complexity of making an uncensored search engine?
Re:it's just cheaper (Score:4, Insightful)
Because 7% of a billion is still 70 million potential users?
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Also because it's wrong?
"Do do evil.'
Pretty tired of all this censorship, really. (Score:2, Troll)
All search engines should just let all the search results show and let the user decide what he wants/ does not want to see with the use of filters, etc.
Any censorship of the results is clearly an attempt at mind control, a prime example being censoring all bad news relating to a country to make it come up smelling like roses.
Yet another reason to avoid Bing like plague.
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If our industry didn't bend over to their regime it would end pretty fuckin' quickly. But profit trumps freedom.
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.
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Not at +5 yet! Mod up!
How is the Western world pulling radical Islamic speech from YouTube etc. really different from the Chinese censoring religions they don't like? And I don't think their government has granted anything as powerful and unaccountable as the DMCA to their corporations...
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It is one thing to apply censorship filters to comply with various countries laws when operating inside that country. But it is an entirely different thing to apply those same filters in other countries where there are no censorship laws.
I think we need a word for that. It is after all an entirely new type of corporate fuck-up. I think "bingled" would be an excellent word for when a corporation does unnecessary censoring to comply with some other country's laws. And stuff like that.
If you can search in Chinese, you must be Chinese. (Score:1)
So if i'm searching from outside China but in Chinese, perhaps I'm *really* searching from within China via a VPN? Let's take no chances....
Tell me (Score:1)
What governmental model does a corporation represent? I've always seen the corps at best as a communist state. At worst, a personality cult.
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What governmental model does a corporation represent?
Just look at the example of the corporation that actually ran a country [wikipedia.org], raised armies, and even waged war [wikipedia.org] in its own name.
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What governmental model does a corporation represent?
Not sure, but many bosses from many companies have assured me that it's "not a democracy".
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Huh, communist? Well I guess it's a lot like how communism turned out in practice - concentrating all productivity to lavish luxury on the "politburo" while making promises of helping everyone better themselves and failing miserably at it, until the whole system collapsed under the disproportionate consumption of the politburo. Like jumping into the later stages of capitalism and then playing out the end at high speed.
In theory, it's closest to a fascist dictatorship.
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Well, I would say it's mostly equivalent to Oligarchy [wikipedia.org] or Feudalism [wikipedia.org].
Corporations seldom act like communists states because it's the people at the top who get the big money and the perks with little concern for the rest (which is how *all* states end up I guess), though if you mean the Tyranny [reference.com] bit, then maybe.
Essentially rule by the wealthy and powerful over everyone else is what I've seen in most companies.
And, like most despots, usually the people at the
Actually its probably innocent (Score:5, Interesting)
They find searches based on what people click on when they search things.
If chinese language users in the filtered system can't see those links then they will have a lower rank if that search system is combined with the unfiltered system.
Therefore, the real solution is to compartmentalize the two lists rather then combining them.
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Yes this is quite possible. It may be that the searches are bringing up what users entering previous Chinese-language searches for similar terms eventually clicked on (i.e. what is more commonly deemed 'interesting' or 'relevant' to the users searching for those terms). English-language users would generally be interested in different results than Chinese users, and from the search engine's perspective, English and Chinese searches for the 'same thing' are two completely unrelated searches.
Simple example. I
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If I understand your point correctly, then it would be easy for someone bilingual in Chinese and English to test this by Googling on the same terms, once in each language. Alas, I do not understand Chinese.
Anyone want to take that on? See if the same thing happens with Google as with Bing?
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If I understand your point correctly, then it would be easy for someone bilingual in Chinese and English to test this by Googling on the same terms, once in each language. Alas, I do not understand Chinese.
Anyone want to take that on? See if the same thing happens with Google as with Bing?
That's not quite an Apples to Apples comparison, because Google doesn't do a filter for China, and Google might be better at factoring in other language click through's than Bing is.
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Been here for awhile... :)
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They find searches based on what people click on when they search things.
If chinese language users in the filtered system can't see those links then they will have a lower rank if that search system is combined with the unfiltered system.
Therefore, the real solution is to compartmentalize the two lists rather then combining them.
This is a very good point. This report doesn't appear to say directly that search results are actually missing (eg. outright blocked), just that they are different. It if is just a case of different automated ranking based on user behaviour then that's another story.
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Possibly. A lot of Chinese people, in China, are apparently offended by any reminder of the "June 4 incident." Look up what happened when Cirque du Soleil used a pic of Tank Man in a background video in one of their performances:
http://www.cnn.com/2013/08/15/... [cnn.com]
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08... [nytimes.com]
So maybe they have become their own censors and Bing gives them what they want.
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Wasn't that a patent owned by Jeeves.com or someone? Increasing rank based on what people clicked on, thus mining the best results from empirical data?
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well all the search engines do that so I don't see how...
Seems to work with with Traditional Chinese (Score:1)
Mainlanders just need to learn to search in Traditional Chinese instead of Simplified Chinese.
Business as usual (Score:1)
Mickeysoft does for China and the PLA what it does for Uncle Sam and the NSA. Bend over, give them anything they want, and give them a booklet to help them help themselves, and censor whatever they want. According to Mickeysoft, the customer is very strictly the one who pays, and 'user' is not necessarily 'customer'.
Probably (Score:1)
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In my experience, you're more likely to get Megafucked by Microsoft.
Simplified or Traditional? (Score:3)
The article only gives Simplified Chinese examples, but is this happening to Traditional Chinese searches too? The two are machine translatable (except probably for one or two characters) so I would not be surprised if search engines simplified things by converting to one or the other before doing a search. So I suspect both.
Which is kinda huge. It's not just Chinese searches from the US or any other country, what about searches from Hong Kong and Taiwan, which use Traditional? Censoring on behalf of the Communist Government in these places would seriously be looked down on.
And what about Singapore which uses Simplified Chinese? I don't imagine they will be pleased to suffer Mainland censorship either.
I sure hope it's just a glitch. Probably not Microsoft automatically kowtowing to China. Probably.
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Is it censorship or just what different people search for? After all, perhaps they're looking at travel or other things and are not interested in the incident?
And Singapore has its own "great firewall" (in fact, a lot of countries do). It's just the Chinese one is a lot more publicized. (They were in the planning ages around 1995 or so and I think It came in a few years later).
the real news is... (Score:3)
that there really might be somebody out there who is actually using BING. Never met any such creature in real life though
SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid (Score:2)
Old news (Score:1)
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To make it clear that Taiwan, Tibet and the Senkaku islands are not included of course...if it gets on China's nerves, I'd support it.
The most important question is: (Score:2)
how the hell did they figure that out if it was written in Chinese?
Affecting so many (Score:1)
Bing users...living in the U.S....who speak Chinese and no English. This has got to affecting a massive amount of users.