Citizen Lab, a Canadian research lab, analyzed the automated recommendation system. bingMicrosoft’s search engine and made a curious discovery: Names of politically sensitive people and subjects in China do not appear in Autocomplete, as with any item fetched in the search service.
According to the lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, these words, whether written in Chinese characters or letters of the English alphabet, second largest category of names censored by auto-suggestiononly behind terms associated with pornography and erotica.
Even “Tank Man” was censored
According to Canadian researchers, the most striking examples of this censorship, not only in China but also in other countries of the world, are Chinese President Xi Jinping, human rights activist Liu Xiaobo and, surprisingly, the “tank man”. A Chinese national standing in front of a section of Type 59 tanks at a military parade in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
It was precisely the search for the term “tanker” (the man’s identity unknown) that sparked criticism against Microsoft last year, as the word was blocked in many countries, including the United States, France, and Singapore. Back then, the Redmond giant attributed the truth to “an accidental human error.”
By Wall Street JournalThe Munk School report raises questions about the far-reaching scope of Chinese censorship, whose Great Firewall (a reference to the Great Wall of China) stifles tedious issues to the Chinese government in the rest of the world. For Citizen Lab Senior Researcher Jeffrey Knockel, If not for Microsoft’s involvementthis censorship would not spread to other regions.
Source: Tec Mundo
