Inside Microsoft’s Censorship of Bing in China

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News. Hey Ryan, hiwan, how are you.

I'm good? Thanks. So what are we doing this morning?

We're going to take a look at the Chinese version of BING and assess the censorship that Microsoft has built into it.

Ryan Gallagher is Bloomberg's investigative reporter on cybersecurity. He's asking me to do an experiment on Microsoft's search engine BING. So let's start. What do we have to do?

First of all, we're going to go to the Chinese version of BING, So you're going to need to load up your VPN and you can simulate a Chinese Internet connection and then you go to cn dot bing dot com.

All right, got that search.

For Tianaman Square massacre.

Okay?

And I will search on my end and I'm in the UK, so I get an international version of BING that doesn't have this censorship integrated within it. So we can compare the results that both of us are seeing.

Ooh, this will be interesting. So what do you see there?

Yeah? Well, I see the top link here as to Wikipedia and it's an article in nineteen eighty Ninetyanamen Square protests and massacres the title of it. I can also see images and links to videos on YouTube and other websites showing footage from the protests and the incidents at Tianamen Square.

The Tienamen Square massacre was a student led protest that was brutally repressed in Beijing in nineteen eighty nine. Demonstrators called for economic and political reform peacefully for weeks, but in the end, the Chinese military was brought in and killed the protesters in mass It is one of the most sensitive and heavily censored topics in China, one that the Chinese government wants nobody to remember. Just to be clear, on my page, there's nothing that alludes to massacre or violence,

Yeah, and this is what you find is very very striking difference between the version that I could see in the version that you can see. What's actually happened with the version of being in China, according to the sources that we've talked to, is a deliberate censorship system that has been created in compliance with what the Chinese government wants.

Today. On our show, Microsoft's decade long compliance with China's censorship regulations and an inside account of the system the companies built. This is the big take from Bloomberg News. I'm wan ha. To be clear, Microsoft's Bing is not the Google of China. The market is dominated by a Chinese search engine called bay Do, but Bing has been gradually growing its market share.

According to the statistics that we have, you know is now the second most popular search engine, even if it has a much smaller market share than buy Do. So that's significant.

And while other Western search engines such as Google are completely blocked by China, Microsoft's Being stands out because it's still accessible on the mainland.

Being is the only Western search engine that's available in China. So that there is an American search engine operating in China and complying with Chinese censorship in this way just as really significant, especially in the currency of political environment. There is a lot of tension between China and the United States.

Microsoft's compliance in China has been known for years, but Ryan's reporting in BusinessWeek is one of the first comprehensive inside accounts of the sophisticated censorship system the company has in place.

Yeah, the story is based on years of reporting and cultivating all kinds of sources to current informer people who work from Microsoft right up to the executive level.

Throughout Ryan's reporting, he found that censorship on being China covers an array of topics way beyond politics.

Almost every facet of society is touched by this human rights or climate change or you know Nobel Peace Prize winners, or corruption within the Communist Party, or some political scandal or even about the Dalai Lama or you know, it's very broad censorship.

Back in nineteen ninety two, Microsoft was one of the first American companies to set up such a big business operation in China.

They really went all in, and Bell Gates, the co founder, has always been a very big proponent of investing in China and growing his business in China.

The company spent years cultivating and building connections and finally one government approval to run the search engine. But the timing of Bing's China launch was peculiar. It went live on June first, two thousand and nine, just three days before the twentieth anniversary of the Tienaman Square massacre.

Yeah, pretty bad time. And because every year when the anniversary happens, the government has a tendency to try to suppress any kind of outpouring of support for what happened in nineteen eighty nine, so tensions always ramp up.

At this period, the Chinese government was on high alert for anything on the internet related to the Tieneman Square protests. Meanwhile, at Microsoft, they.

Have everything set up. They've got all the the approvals in place, they have all the infrastructure, a really big infrastructure, all the servers. It's already to go online. And when they, you know, finally pushed the button to make it go live so that people in China can finally access this heavily anticipated new search engine. Quite quickly, it's suddenly just gone. Anyone trying to visit the site is getting an error page, you know that, It's like it vanishes.

Microsoft was dumbfounded. Initially, they thought there was a technical problem on their site, maybe the server had crashed, maybe there was too much traffic, but everything was running fine. And after floria phone calls between Microsoft's lawyers and Chinese government officials and explanation emerged.

The Chinese government was feeling so worried about the launch of this search engine. Just before the anniversary of the Turnament Square massacred that they actually just blocked the traffic to Bing, so they pulled it offline before it really got a chance, and then Microsoft had to renegotiate with the government to get it back up again.

And the blocking of being wasn't just about sensitivities around the Tieneman Square massacre.

Well, I think it was probably a very deliberate strategy by the Chinese government to kind of show who was boss in a way, and they were, you know, they were trying to say it, we're in control here, not you.

That message was heard loud and clear at Microsoft. Ryan says the tech company had already planned to integrate the censorship requested by the Chinese government, but his sources told him that the company went above and beyond.

A lot of the censorship that we see on Being China is self censorship, is Microsoft choosing which topics to remove. What I was told was that their possession was that they would just over censor, they would overfilter because that was the easier thing to do, rather than having been pulled offline again.

In response to Ryan's story, Microsoft said in a statement quote Bing is the least censored search engine in China and is often the only accessible source for volumes of information there. The statement goes on to say Microsoft only censors results in response to a narrow legal order and regularly pushes back. And just as Microsoft was getting used

And it was a really massive cyber attack that Google said was intended to gather information from Google servers about certain Chinese dissidents who were using like Gmail and other Google services. And also later they said the censorship that they were being forced to comply with on Chinese version of Google was just increasing exponentially and they couldn't tolerate that. So Google ended up leaving and Bang was left there.

The leaders at Microsoft took a completely different view from Google. Here's co founder Bill Gates on ABC News responding to Google's departure from China. Listen to how he frames China's censorship of being Well.

It's a complex issue. The role of the Internet in every country has been very positive, letting people speak out in new ways, and fortunately the Chinese efforts to censor the Internet have been very limited. You know, it's easy to go around it, and so I think keeping the Internet thriving there is very important.

A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, DC said in a statement that China's Internet is quote free, open, and orderly, and that it welcomed foreign companies to operate in the country. It added that foreign invested enterprises in China should quote abide by China's laws and regulations, respect the interests, culture, and traditions of the general public, and assume the corresponding social responsibilities. Ryan, why is China so obsessed with censoring the Internet.

Well, you know, it's authoritarian government is run by the Chinese Communist Party, so it's just about you know, they want their version of events to be the only version of events. The bigger picture, of course, is that they don't want a challenge to their power. They don't want people to have information that might lead them to question authority. So it's fundamentally about control, and it's about power.

And really giving people access to only a slice of reality, right, not everything that's out there.

Yeah, and beyond I think beyond a slice of reality, it's like an alternative reality as a reality that is filtered through Chinese Communist party glasses if you like, you know, is their worldview which they create for themselves. It's oftentimes a completely false impression of the truth. And so what bing is doing here is helping to reinforce that alternative reality through its version of being in China.

After the break, how Microsoft helps feed an alternative reality on the Chinese web and why now? The technology that enables web censorship in China is generic and neutral. It's the same technology that filters out child pornography or copyrighted music in searches.

So the technology behind the filtering system we were told involves a combination of machine learning, so kind of automated systems that will be able to assess different content and stop it from getting through to the search engine, and also human reviewers, so just people who will actually review the content on the search and flag anything that they think shouldn't be there.

Over the years, censorship in China has increased exponentially and the blacklist has only gotten longer. And with that, scrutiny and criticism of Microsoft's operation in China has gotten louder.

Independent groups like the Citizen lab and they've possessed upwards of one hundred thousand different phrases and terms, and they're seeing those removed from Bing. And actually, the researchers said that in some cases, on political issues in particular, Bing was actually more aggressive in its censorship than the domestic Chinese search engines like Baydu, which I found extraordinary. You know that in an American search engine would be censoring more than the domestic Chinese ones.

Even inside Microsoft, Bloomberg's reporting found that employees had become disturbed with how far reaching Bing's censorship was. They raised red flags over the company's practice in China and called out Microsoft for acting against its own stated principles. On

It's such a good question, and really I've been scratching my head trying to figure this out, and I've talked to a lot of people about it, and you know, the general consensus form my sources is that the reason they're still operating it is simply because BING is heavily integrated into other Microsoft products like Windows and also the

And then there's the issue of labor.

Also, another reason that cited to me from our sources was that actually a surprising number of the sort of core engineering team that the key people in Microsoft who are developing being that's actually being done by people in China. So they're not just working on the Chinese version, they're working on the international version. So if you get rid of being in China, it would leave them in this really difficult situation because the key people who are working on it are all still in China.

Outside of China, Microsoft's Chinese model has set a precedent for other governments that want to control access to information online. In recent years, the Russian government has asked Microsoft to remove thousands of pieces of content from Bing, including links to political, opposition and news websites, and according to what the employees told Bloomberg, the company has often complied, and as that censorship intensifies, it's also left room for mistakes.

It shows how difficult it can be for them to kind of have this dual system where they have this really heavily censored version in China and then the rest of the world trying to operate a more open search engine that isn't filtered. It's difficult to do both because it seems like the censorship can sometimes pollute the nonsensored versions, whether accidentally or otherwise.

Ran If Microsoft wants to stay in China, does it really have any better options? I mean, do they absolutely have to censor and even over sensor.

This is the type rope that Microsoft has been trying to walk. You know, this is the dilemma that they've been trying to navigate. I don't believe for a second that in an ideal world, Microsoft would want to be doing this, but they're choosing to do it because they want to be in China. And the question is has it gone too far? And a lot of people, certainly in the human rights community, think that has gone far too far. You know, you just have to look at

And for now they seem to be okay with it.

Well yeah, I mean they're still there, they're still doing it, they're still defending it. So, you know, I think there's a lot of people in Microsoft, frankly, who are deeply uncomfortable with it, but you know, the powers that be within the company want to be there, and so as long as that is the case, they're going to be there.

This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm oneh This episode was produced by Young Young and Naomi Ryan Gallagher part of the story. It was mixed by Young Young and Rishi but Jay Gold. Our senior producers are Naomi Shaven and Elizabeth Ponso. Nicole Beemster Bower is our executive producer, and Sage Bauman is Bloomberg's head of podcast. Thanks for listening to the Big Take. We'll be back tomorrow.