China ARTICLE 19 executives and downloaded data from the company’s servers.99 In 2019, Bing was temporarily blocked in China on the same day the authorities announced that they had closed 733 websites and shut down 9,382 apps in a crackdown on ‘harmful’ information. When Microsoft confirmed that Bing had been temporarily inaccessible, Microsoft’s president Brad Smith said that Microsoft had ‘days when there are either difficult negotiations or even disagreements’ with the Chinese authorities about search results on Bing but that Microsoft was ‘not aware of any ongoing negotiation or disagreement, so we’re working to understand it better’.100 In 2021 and again in 2022, Bing said that it had been required by regulators to temporarily suspend its autosuggest feature. No reason for the suspension was given.101 For many years, there has been evidence that Bing has censored searches. In 2009, searching for terms such as ‘Tiananmen’ on Bing in English or traditional Chinese produced results about ‘killings’, but searches in simplified Chinese produced ‘sanitized procommunist results’.102 Microsoft denied that it was censoring search results, claiming it was a bug which was being fixed, but 6 months later these searches were still being censored.103 At times, censorship of political topics in China appears to impact Bing search results even outside of China. In 2014, searches in the United States generated different results in simplified Chinese than in English, apparently due to censorship of controversial topics such as the Dalai Lama or the Tiananmen Square protests. Bing blamed an error in its system.104 One expert suggested that Microsoft was not intentionally censoring results internationally but was engaging in ‘second hand censorship’ by failing to consider the impact of applying its normal search algorithms in the censored Chinese information landscape.105 In any case, Bing seems to have failed to address the problem. In 2021, search results for ‘Tank Man’ failed to produce the iconic image of the protester in Tiananmen Square, including for international users.106 A more comprehensive study in 2022 by the Citizen Lab also found that the autosuggest feature in the United States and Canada exhibited signs of politically sensitive results being censored in China. The authors hypothesised various reasons for this but ultimately concluded that it was not possible for the platform to insulate its operations outside of China from censorship that it was enforcing inside China.107 ____________________________________________ P. Mozur and K. Weise, China Appears to Block Microsoft’s Bing as Censorship Intensifies, New York Times, 23 January 2019. 100 S. Pham, Microsoft Search Engine Bing Was Briefly Blocked in China, CNN, 24 January 2019. 101 Reuters, Microsoft’s Bing Suspends Auto Suggest Function in China at Government’s Behest, 17 December 2021; Reuters, China Requires Microsoft’s Bing to Suspend Auto-Suggest Feature, 21 March 2022. 102 N. Kristof, Microsoft and Chinese Censorship, 24 June 2009, New York Times Opinion. 103 Kristof, Microsoft and Chinese Censorship. 104 D. Rushe, Microsoft Blames ‘System Error’ but Denies Censoring Chinese Search Results, Guardian, 12 February 2014. 105 Rushe, Microsoft Blames ‘System Error’. 106 BBC, Microsoft Says Error Caused ‘Tank Man’ Bing Censorship, 5 June 2021; M. Caster, Opinion: Big Tech Needs a Reset on Chinese Censorship, Thomson Reuters Foundation News, 7 June 2021. 107 J. Knockel and L. Ruan, Bada Bing, Bada Boom: Microsoft Bing’s Chinese Political Censorship of Autosuggestions in North America, The Citizen Lab, 19 May 2022. 99 29