Microsoft says error led to Bing blocking images of Tiananmen 'tank man'

submited by

Style Pass

2021-06-05 03:39:35

Microsoft Corp on Friday blamed "accidental human error" for its Bing search engine not showing image results for the query "tank man" in the United States and elsewhere after users raised concerns about possible censorship around the Tiananmen Square crackdown anniversary.

Users, including in the United Kingdom, Germany and Singapore, reported Friday that when they performed the search Bing returned the message, "There are no results for tank man."

David Greene, civil liberties director at the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that content moderation was impossible to do perfectly and "egregious mistakes are made all the time."

"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.

Smaller search engines such as DuckDuckGo that license results from Microsoft faced similar issues around "tank man" searches and said they expected a fix soon.