Microsoft says Bing’s ‘Tank Man’ censorship was a human error
The search engine returned to China in 2019
On Microsoft's search engine Bing, a search for "tank man", the iconic figure from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest in China, yielded no image results for part of Friday in the United States. Vice was able to produce similar results in the US, and heard from several users in other countries who ran into the same issue.
Stranger still, a search for "Tank Man" or "Tiananmen Square Tank Man" brought up the usual search results in Bing, the only images that were mysteriously missing. When The Verge contacted Microsoft for clarification, it said, "This is due to an accidental human error and we are actively working to resolve it."
This is an unfortunately timely accident, given that June 4, 2021 marks the 32nd anniversary of student-led protests in China - an insurgency in response to changes in the country that was met with assault rifles, tanks and a massacre . Microsoft eventually restored the results of the specific search, although it still noticeably missing the famous image. However, adding in the mention of "Tiananmen" or "Tiananmen Square" it pulls off what you'd expect. It's unclear why Bing would weigh more on generic images of tanks than a well-known piece of visual history, but we've reached out to Microsoft to see if this is normal.
Bing's presence in China is somewhat complicated. According to the Financial Times, the search engine almost disappeared from the country for a day in 2019 after state-owned telecommunications company China Unicom was ordered to block it. Microsoft did not disclose the cause of the outage, but service was eventually restored.
Google experienced issues in its search for a modified version of Google Search for China, but faced harsh backlash from employees and US regulators over how the product could affect users in the country.