According to Canadian experts, this demonstrates the risk of cooperating with one government's censoring requests in a product sold throughout the world.
According to a group of Canadian academics, Microsoft created invisible hurdles for web searches including names of persons deemed politically sensitive by China's government—not just in China, but also in the US and Canada.
The Citizen Lab, a research group based at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, discovered a pattern of Microsoft's Bing search engine suppressing auto-suggestions for queries involving "party leaders, dissidents, and other persons considered politically sensitive in the China."
"We consistently found that Bing censors politically sensitive Chinese names over time, that their censorship spans multiple Chinese political topics, that their censorship consists of at least two languages, English and Chinese, and that their censorship applies to different world regions, including China, the United States, and Canada," the report concludes.
Citizen Lab's analysis is based on information from Chinese and North American networks done in December, which included searches in both English and Chinese as well as Microsoft's own Keyword Research API.
After names associated with pornography and nudity, Citizen Lab discovered that the second most common auto-suggest suppression involved Chinese political figures, such as authoritarian president Xi Jinping or Li Wenliang, a doctor who tried to warn colleagues about the growing novel-coronavirus pandemic in late 2019, was denounced by police as a troublemaker and died of COVID in February 2020.
Even in the United States and Canada, Citizen Lab discovered that entering part or all of such names provided no auto-suggestion results. This impacted inquiries on DuckDuckGo and Yahoo, both of which rely significantly on Bing's search index; in April, the three search sites accounted for a little over 12% of the US market.
Users in North America could always click Enter for a complete set of results.
(This paper also includes a caution that any automatic content filtering may be tricky: "We discovered that the most prevalent cause for a name being collaterally filtered was including the word 'Dick,' e.g., 'Dick Cheney.')
Citizen Lab, which has documented numerous cases of government interference in online services, including an August 2020 report documenting China's suppression of pandemic-related keywords on domestic social media, describes this as a result of a company attempting to operate in and comply with both democracies and oppressive regimes. "An Internet platform cannot support free expression for one demography of its users while imposing substantial political censorship on another demographic of its users," the paper states.
"In general, the auto-suggestions someone gets are primarily dependent on the query itself, and driven mostly by user activity, such as the questions other local users are searching for," Microsoft said in a statement. "Just because you don't see an auto-suggestion doesn't imply it's been banned."
Entering "xi j" in Bing and DuckDuckGo in an incognito session in Chrome Friday morning provided auto-suggest results like "xi Jinping net worth," but typing part or all of "li wenliang" yielded nothing. In an incognito Google session, both queries returned the typical auto-suggestions.
The Chinese Communist Party's zealous control of internet services forced Microsoft to close LinkedIn in the nation and has kept Google out (although it was developing a censored Chinese-market search site before employee protests and other US criticism led it to terminate that effort in 2019).
According to independent estimates, China is one of the least free countries on the planet. It has a "freedom score" of 9 out of 100 from Freedom House, and it is ranked 175th out of 180 countries for press freedom by Reporters Without Borders.