Exclusive: Microsoft Bing’s censorship in China is even “more extreme” than Chinese companies’

Bing’s censorship rules in China are so stringent that even mentioning President Xi Jinping leads to a complete block of translation results, according to new research by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab that has been shared exclusively with Rest of World. 

The institute found that Microsoft censors its Bing translation results more than top Chinese services, including Baidu Translate and Tencent Machine Translation. Bing became the only major foreign translation and search engine service available in China after Google withdrew from the Chinese market in 2010. 

“If you try to translate five paragraphs of text, and two sentences contain a mention of Xi, Bing’s competitors in China would delete those two sentences and translate the rest. In our testing, Bing always censors the entire output. You get a blank. It is more extreme,” Jeffrey Knockel, senior research associate at Citizen Lab, told Rest of World. 

Citizen Lab’s report found last year that alongside Bing’s translation service, its China-based search engine also censors more extensively than Chinese firms’ services do. The studies challenge the popular belief that U.S. tech giants might resist Chinese censorship demands more strongly than their Chinese counterparts. Microsoft has not responded to Rest of World’s requests for comment.   

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