A new Bloomberg report explores Microsoft’s willingness to censor the search results delivered to people who use Bing within China.
We’ve long known that foreign search engines cannot operate in China without obeying the orders of the Chinese Communist Party to smother such inquiries as “Tiananmen Square” and “tank man.” Bloomberg’s account is occasioning fresh attention to the practice (“How Microsoft’s Bing Helps Maintain Beijing’s Great Firewall,” March 7, 2024).
In 2021, the world was reminded of Microsoft’s complicity thanks to what a Microsoft spokesman called “accidental human error.”
For a little while, not even European and American users of Bing could get any results for the search term “tank man,” a phrase that outside of China usually elicits many instances of the iconic photos of the lone protestor who briefly impeded the progress of the China’s tanks during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.
“There are no results for ‘tank man,’ ” announced the search engine in response to search queries. “Check your spelling or try different keywords.”
Asked about the issue at the time, a Microsoft Corp. spokesperson blamed “accidental human error.” According to three people familiar with the matter, the full explanation, which has never been publicly revealed before now, was that Microsoft accidentally applied the blacklist it uses for the Chinese version of Bing to the entire world, providing an unintended glimpse of how it works with Beijing to give Chinese users a sanitized view of the internet.
US internet companies have long struggled with the complications of operating in China. After making significant compromises on issues such as censorship to maintain access to China’s huge market, Google and Yahoo! stopped operating their own search engines there; Facebook, Snapchat and X (formerly Twitter) are unavailable.
None of these search engine providers should have spent any time “struggling with” the supposedly complicated question of whether to voluntarily provide ways and means of tyranny. At least, though, after the struggle, some did recognize the problem and did exit the Chinese market (at least the market for Internet search). Not so Microsoft, which, “by contrast, has continued to run a local version of Bing since 2009 in compliance with Beijing’s censorship requirements.”
[Microsoft cofounder] Bill Gates has long advocated working closely with China to encourage innovation in health and science—and has dismissed concerns about censorship and the country’s influence on technology. Gates stepped down from Microsoft’s board in 2020 but has continued to visit Chinese leaders; he met with President Xi Jinping in June 2023, Xi’s first with a foreign entrepreneur in years. During the meeting, Xi described Gates as his “old friend.”
Satya Nadella, who’s been Microsoft’s chief executive officer for the past decade, has echoed Gates’s sentiments about the utility of providing internet services even when it means cooperating with authoritarian governments.
Critics like Yaqiu Wang, of Freedom House, say that Microsoft’s collaboration with the Chinese government is upsetting and outrageous. “Microsoft is one of the largest companies in the world, it is hugely profitable, and it claims to support democracy and human rights. But if you look at its actions in China, it is the opposite.”
Microsoft disagrees that it is doing anything bad by providing the Chinese with a tyranny-doctored version of Bing. The company says that it censors search results only when told to censor them and always in strict accordance with “proper interpretation of Chinese rules.”
Here is an example of this conscientious adherence to “proper interpretation” of CCP rules:
In China, Bing purges Western news websites and Wikipedia. Searches related to alleged abuses of the ethnic minority Uyghur population in China’s Xinjiang region yield results devoid of the specifics of human-rights violations and concentration camps; instead the results are made up of state media news reports that deny abuses and accuse Western governments of waging a “disinformation war against China.” There are also links to travel guides for the region. Searches for many other blacklisted phrases produce results from Chinese government or state media websites, which have been “whitelisted,” meaning they’re never blocked from the results, according to the employees. And, of course, results for searches about Chinese government censorship—and how to circumvent it—are themselves censored.
Microsoft isn’t always obeying specific orders when it censors. As Bloomberg notes, “the company has developed a knack for anticipating when Beijing will take issue with particular types of content. In a report published in April 2023, researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab analyzed about 500,000 censored keywords and names across search engines in the country. They found that Bing had less censorship than Baidu overall but that it was more aggressive than Baidu when it came to restricting access to political and religious content.”
You can see that Microsoft limits its cooperation as much as it possibly can given the tenets of its rationalizations. Microsoft goes the extra mile to censor results only with respect to types of things the CCP might object to, stuff like “political and religious content.” The Chinese people are probably allowed to see the full range of standard search results on such matters as the weather or ceramics.
Microsoft is also among the American companies who have provided the Chinese government with technology to help make its Golden Shield, a digital surveillance program that targets Tibetans, Uyghurs, Hongkongers, and others who because of such surveillance may be imprisoned, tortured, or murdered.
Would Microsoft argue that in this case, too, it has arrived at the golden mean for enabling oppression? A formula for facilitating the Chinese state’s evil work not too little and not too much but just the exact right amount?
Also see:
CinderQ: “Tank Man”
This fifteen-minute film tells a story of what tank man’s day may have been like before he did what he did. His identity remains unknown.
