A web search engine owned and operated by Microsoft is censoring Chinese autosuggestions in North America, according to a recent report.
A recently released report by Citizen Lab stated that apart from adult-oriented content, the second largest censored autosuggestion group was comprised of "those of Chinese party leaders, dissidents and other persons considered politically sensitive in China."
The censorship is not only within the search engine for China, but also the U.S. and Canada and it has also seeped into Windows and DuckDuckGo, which utilizes Bing's autosuggestions, according to the report.
The report explains that other companies have long been engaging in censorship in China. As Chinese corporations expand across the world, so does the country’s censorship, the article pointed out.
In a tweet on May 19, Citizen Lab posted the question, "Think Bing's autosuggestion feature will help US users search for Xi Jinping? Think again.” They also attached a gif that shows search recommendations disappearing as the name "Xi Jinping” was slowly typed out.
“A small number of users may have experienced a misconfiguration that prevented surfacing some valid autosuggest terms, and we thank Citizen Lab for bringing this to our attention,” a Microsoft spokeswoman said, according to the Wall Street Journal.
A contrasting comment was given from Jeffrey Knockel, a senior research associate at Citizen Lab who helped with the report. “If Microsoft had never engaged in Chinese censorship operations in the first place, there would be no way for them to spill into other regions," Knockel said.
This isn’t the first time Microsoft has been linked to the Chinese Communist Party, as Global Banner reported earlier this year that an Innovation Hub established by Microsoft Asia in 2017 was a medium for 50 Chinese organizations. The measure was so alarming that the U.S. Commerce Department put one of Microsoft's entities as a Chinese state-owned defense conglomerate that was linked to the Chinese military.