SAN FRANCISCO: Microsoft blamed “accidental human error” for its Bing search engine not showing image results for the query “tank man” in the United States and elsewhere on the Tiananmen Square crackdown anniversary.
Many users including in the United Kingdom, Germany and Singapore, raised concerns about possible censorship and reported that when they performed the search Bing returned the message, “There are no results for tank man.”
References to the pro-democracy protest movement have long been censored in China where the government maintains strict control over the internet, but the censorship by Bing extended to users outside China’s “great firewall”. Hours after Microsoft acknowledged the issue, the “tank man” search returned only pictures of tanks elsewhere in the world.
“Tank man” is often used to describe an unidentified person famously pictured standing before tanks in China’s Tiananmen Square during pro-democracy demonstrations in June 1989.
Microsoft said the issue was “due to an accidental human error and we are actively working to resolve this.” Smaller search engines such as DuckDuckGo that license results from Microsoft faced similar issues around “tank man” searches. Google showed many results for the famous image when the “tank man” search was performed on Friday.
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The move came amid China’s crackdown on Hong Kong where it banned the Tiananmen Square anniversary vigil for the second year in a row. China is known to require search engines operating in its jurisdiction to censor results, but those restrictions are rarely applied elsewhere.
US-based tech companies have long struggled to balance their desire to operate in China’s enormous market with the censorship demands of the government. Bing is one of the few foreign search engines accessible in China because the company has agreed to censor results for sensitive terms such as the Dalai Lama, Tiananmen Square or Falun Gong.
In 2016, it was reported that Facebook was working on a secret tool that would allow a third party to censor the platform for Chinese users in exchange for the PRC allowing Facebook to operate within the country.
In 2018, employees at Google exposed an internal project to build a censored search engine that the company hoped would allow it to re-enter China. Google had pulled out of China in 2010 over censorship and hacking.
