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Microsoft's search engine Bing appears to be heavily censoring its Chinese-language search results across the globe as well as inside China, a cyber-monitoring group said Wednesday.

According to the group Greatfire.org, international Chinese-language Bing searches for topics deemed politically sensitive by Beijing return a drastically different set of results than English-language searches.

Censored search terms include the name of jailed 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, the exiled spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, it said.

"This is the kind of story that begets a Congressional hearing," the group, which tracks the vast Chinese online censorship apparatus known as the Great Firewall, said in a statement releasing its findings.

"We are 100% sure our findings indicate that Microsoft is cleansing search results in the United States to remove negative news and information about China," it added. "And they are doing this in every market in which they operate in the world."

A Microsoft spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment by AFP.

Bing is the second-most-popular Internet search engine in the US, with an 18.2 percent market share to Google's 67.3 percent in December 2013, according to Microsoft.

Tests conducted by AFP confirmed several of Greatfire.org's findings.

An English-language search using servers outside China for "Liu Xiaobo" returned a list of results from overseas sources including the Norwegian Nobel Committee, the New York Times, Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia.

In a Chinese-language search of Liu's name, by contrast, six of the top ten search results were links to Chinese government and state-run media pages containing the same text -- a lengthy disparagement of Liu that compiles some of his more-controversial statements.

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Microsoft's Bing accused of Chinese-language censorship

Censorship Assignment Ethics
Me and my crew members just got the Highest marks for doing this video assignment!~!! So i #39;m guessing why not just share it to the public 🙂 I #39;m the host, th...

By: Arif Yusof

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Censorship Assignment Ethics - Video

Dil Debate on Censorship
Debate on the censorship of the word homophobia and the controversial pay out of compensation to members of the IONA institute.

By: Clare Daly

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Dil Debate on Censorship - Video

TURKISH PROTESTORS ANGRY ABOUT INTERNET CENSORSHIP
WHERE #39;S THE OUTRAGE OVER US CENSORSHIP OF NEWS? OUTRAGE OVER THE AMERICAN PRESS LYING, AND FEEDING IT #39;S OWN PEOPLE GOVERNMENT, AND CORPORATE PROPAGANDA? WHER...

By: KafkaWinstonWorld

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TURKISH PROTESTORS ANGRY ABOUT INTERNET CENSORSHIP - Video

(Wiki commons)

IN my previous column, I explored the idea of the government restricting or entirely locking Malaysians out from social media and the Internet. It seemed like a fortuitous article in light of the events to date, specifically the kangkung incident.

In early January, kangkung memes lampooning Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak hit social media. This prompted a BBC Trending article that resulted in a firestorm when DigitalNewsAsia broke a story about how certain ISPs were blocking users from accessing the article. The cabinet at that point reportedly contemplated strong action to stop the lampooning of the prime minister but decided instead to affirm the MSC Bill of Guarantees (BoG).

But the cabinet did not issue an official statement to the above effect. And lets not forget, the BoG isnt really law, its the equivalent of a mission statement or service commitment at best.

In this column, I want to float a provocative suggestion: that the cabinet has it wrong and the BoG cannot be used as a basis, legal or otherwise, to justify access to Internet content that is satirical or parodic in nature.

Back to basics: The MSC

In the United States, satire and parody are clearly protected under the First Amendmentand, accordingly, are not subject to legal impediment except in limited circumstances.

Malaysia does not have a Bill of Rights and has a restricted free speech provision in the constitution. This means Malaysia is using the BoG provision on no Internet censorship as a stand-in to protect access to the Internet and, to a lesser degree, freedom of speech and the right to create parody and satire.

Yet, the origin of the BoG is very different from that of the US Bill of Rights. The BoG is inherently linked with the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC), which was created in 1996 as a Special Economic Zone. The MSC is a strategic economic initiative, not a political one, and its BoG was designed with the economic emphasis in mind.

The preamble of the BoG states that it reflects the governments intention to provide an environment in MSC Malaysia that is conducive to the development of MSC Malaysia Status entities. Aside from BoG #7, which relates to Internet censorship, the other nine relate to corporate or economic guarantees, from the freedom to source capital and workers to tax-free status and infrastructure commitments.

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A kangkung leaf covering the nakedness of censorship