Microsoft's Bing accused of Chinese-language censorship

Microsoft's search engine Bing appears to be censoring its Chinese-language search results across the globe as well as inside China, cyber-monitoring group Greatfire.org said Wednesday.

Microsoft, responding to allegations from the rights group, denied it was intentionally omitting websites from the search engine. The company has in the past come under fire for censoring the Chinese version of its Internet phone and messaging software Skype.

"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," Stefan Weitz, senior director for Bing, said in a statement emailed to Reuters on Wednesday.

Weitz did not say if the error had been fixed, but results removal warnings were still appearing on Bing Wednesday afternoon. Microsoft officials in Beijing declined to elaborate. Microsoft sent a shortened version of the statement to China-based media organizations, which omitted all reference to GreatFire.org and did not address the allegations.

International Chinese-language Bing searches for topics deemed politically sensitive by Beijing return a drastically different set of results than English-language searches.

Allegedly censored search terms include the name of jailed 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, the exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Greatfire.org said.

"This is the kind of story that begets a Congressional hearing," said the group, which tracks the vast Chinese online censorship apparatus known as the Great Firewall.

"We are 100 percent sure our findings indicate that Microsoft is cleansing search results in the United States to remove negative news and information about China," it added. "And they are doing this in every market in which they operate in the world."

A Microsoft spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment by the Agence France Presse news service.

The English-language search results on both Google and Bing were similar.

An English-language search using servers outside China for "Liu Xiaobo" returned a list of results from overseas sources including the Norwegian Nobel Committee, the New York Times, Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia.

In a Chinese-language search of Liu's name, by contrast, six of the top 10 search results were links to Chinese government and state-run media pages containing the same text — a lengthy disparagement of Liu that compiles some of his more-controversial statements.

The first page of results from the same Chinese-language search using Google and conducted outside the country includes links to pages in Chinese from Wikipedia, the New York Times, German broadcaster Deutsche Welle and the BBC.

Tests conducted by AFP, Reuters and Al Jazeera confirmed several of Greatfire.org's search findings.

China's ruling Communist Party sees censorship as key to maintaining its grip on power, recognizing that social media offers a platform for citizens to air grievances and criticism of the government, a potential trigger for social unrest.

This censorship often means foreign Internet companies must tread a careful path in China to exploit business opportunities without compromising their image as champions of open societies and free speech.

All Internet firms operating in China comply with the government's web censorship requirements.

Microsoft has made no secret of its aim to build a bigger presence in China, a market where its software is widely used but rarely paid for.

Bing is the second-most-popular Internet search engine in the U.S., with an 18.2 percent market share to Google's 67.3 percent in December 2013, according to Microsoft.

Wire Services