zlacker

I'm guessing it is a "hand tuned" search result tweak because just appending "china" returns a few images:

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=tank%20man%20china

(For those who don't see results, this is my screen grab of the above at 18:12 UTC : https://imgur.com/a/3tzPV49)

Also, "Tiananmen Square massacre" still returns some image results:

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Tiananmen+Square+massac...

Therefore, the tweak for "tank man" doesn't seem to make any sense since all the other phrases to get to the same sensitive topic are not suppressed.

>>jasode+(OP)
The first one returns no images for me

>>jasode+(OP)
Even searching for tank woman or tank cat returns results!

>>jasode+(OP)
Indeed, if you search for “tanpk man” (without quotes) it says “including results for tank man” and has many pictures of tanks and men (but none of tank man...) So, it clearly is associating some images with “tank man”, it just doesn’t show results if your search is for “tank man”

>>jasode+(OP)
"Tank man china" returns no results as of 19:01 UTC.

>>jasode+(OP)
As of right now, "tank man china" gives some results, but not the tank man photo. Looks like it's been scrubbed. Crazy.

>>jasode+(OP)
It's the 6th result for "tank guy" for me. "china protest man tank" also gets it. "Tiananmen square" doesn't autocomplete on bing either, for "some reason"...

It's surprising and shameful to me that Microsoft would be censoring so brazenly even in US search results. Also embarrassing on a technical level that their censorship is this bad. It's also pretty bad at image search compared to Google (compare Google Images "tank guy" to Bing's).

Companies that sell their soul for money are one thing, but Bing has ~2% market share in China, and for this they are crudely censoring search results worldwide? Madness.

>>jasode+(OP)
Yes, I'm sure this is done via word-filter.

Historically, China doesn't provide a list of banned terms themselves, and companies have to reverse-engineer the list of prohibited terms. Likely Bing has a list of the most obvious terms, as recommended by their lawyers.

>>ALittl+xk
I, for one, am glad that this particular Microsoft censorship is global in nature for all to see.

A lot of people say China's internet censorship doesn't matter because it's mainly/just within their own borders, and anyone in China can and does just use a VPN to get outside. While the latter might be true, it misses the point - China is doing a great job of making self-censorship about a number of their sensitive topics a global phenomenon.

>>jasode+(OP)
> Microsoft said the issue was "due to an accidental human error and we are actively working to resolve this."

(I did some searching.) This is from a report here:

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/microsoft-bing-raises-c...

Of course, the search result is an MSN link.

>>jasode+(OP)
Adding "tiananmen square" to "tank man" does return the photo as the 3rd result: tank man tiananmen square

Also, the misspelled version of Tianenmen that I first used worked as well.

>>jasode+(OP)
"6 4 incident" returns meaningful results on Duck Duck Go and Google, but nothing on Microsoft Bing.

>>jasode+(OP)
Turning safe search off also returns results more like you'd expect, though a bunch of those images are blanked out even then.

>>jonath+Uz
OTOH "tank man tiananmen" is also censored. It's pretty clear that there are some specific queries being mishandled here.

>>drdavi+Ez
"actively working to resolve this." Isn't it just remove the filter and that's it?

>>ww520+c91
I bet the filter was supposed to be applied only to China IPs but was accidentally applied over all IPs. So whatever work is required to fix that and roll it out