Mediaboss Marketing

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.

See the rest here:
Microsoft's Bing accused of Chinese-language censorship

Microsoft has been accused of censoring Bings Chinese-language search results for people in the US, in the same way that it does for those based in China, according to activists.

The claims were made by The Guardian newspaper, which said that several activist blogs had reported seeing very different results on Bing for queries made in Chinese, as opposed to those made in English. Searching for controversial terms such as Dalai Lama, June 4 protests and Falun Gong, among others, throws up pages for organizations and groups that are allied with the Chinese government, whilst similar searches in English are very different, and much less pro-China.

The Guardian reports:

Searches first conducted by anti-censorship campaigners at FreeWeibo, a tool that allows uncensored search of Chinese blogs, found that Bing returns radically different results in the US for English and Chinese language searches on a series of controversial terms.

A Chinese language search for the Dalai Lama () on Bing is lead by a link to information on a documentary compiled by CCTV, Chinas state-owned broadcaster. This is followed by two entries from Baidu Baike, Chinas heavily censored Wikipedia rival run by the search engine Baidu. The results are similar on Yahoo, whose search is powered by Bing.

The Guardian carried out a similar experiment on Google Search, and found that controversial terms returned similar results in both languages.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft was quick to deny that Bings been censoring its search results, saying that the discrepancies were due to an error in its system:

Weve conducted an investigation of the claims raised by Greatfire.org., said Stefan Weitz, Senior Director Bing, in a statement to Business Insider:

First, Bing does not apply Chinas legal requirements to searches conducted outside of China. Due to an error in our system, we triggered an incorrect results removal notification for some searches noted in the report but the results themselves are and were unaltered outside of China.

Microsoft is a signatory to the Global Network Initiative, which is an effort by a multi-stakeholder group of companies, civil society organizations (including human rights and press freedom groups), investors and academics to protect and advance freedom of expression and privacy on the Internet. As part of our commitment to GNI, Microsoft follows a strict set of internal procedures for how we respond to specific demands from governments requiring us to block access to content. We apply these principles carefully and thoughtfully to our Bing version for the Peoples Republic of China.

Continue reading here:
Bings Chinese-language censorship balls-up is huge PR disaster

When wars assume new forms, a commitment to serve freedom of information means taking risks that are hard to calculate. The negative correlation between conflicts and freedom of information was highlighted by the way Maliand Central African Republicplunged in the index.

Control of the media has always been a strategic goal in conflicts. When soldiers led by Capt. Amadou Sanogo staged a coup d'tat in the Malian capital of Bamako in March 2012, their first move was to take over the national radio and TV broadcaster. Thanks to new technology, traditional media such as radio stations and newspapers are no longer the only news outlets, and the number and type of news aninformation providers operating on the ground has increased.

Conflicts in Africa are also now assuming many different forms. No longer limited to battles between armies, they may take the form of lower-level or asymmetric conflicts pitting armed groups against more or less proper armies or against other armed groups. At the same time, the terrorist threat is increased by the way some groups with a political agenda use armed conflict for economic gain, as seen in the internecine wars for the control of mineral deposits in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

These problems impact the flow of news and information. Because of the dangers, journalists find it increasingly difficult to access the terrain of military operations. During France's Operation Serval in Mali, some reporters chose to travel with military convoys going to the front line into order not to leave the French military as the only source of information about this war. But this method nonetheless resulted in very partial coverage, froma single viewpoint, of events on the ground.

Armed conflict's new protagonists, especially terrorist groups, do not feel bound by the Geneva Conventions, which protect civilians, including journalists, during armed conflict. On the contrary, journalists become high-value targets in an "information war."

Somalia's Islamist militia Al-Shabaab, for example, has always targeted journalists as unwanted witnesses of its terrorist methods. With seven journalists killed in 2013, Somalia is Africa's deadliest country for media personnel. No fewer than 18 were killed in terrorist attacks in 2012.

The threat in Mogadishu is so great that some media went so far as to let their journalists live at their work place to avoid dangerous commutes. Can a terror campaign be presumed successful when journalists can no longer move about freely in search of information?

Visit link:
Africa: Wars and Terrorist Threats Weaken Media Africa

A new Reporters Without Borders index cites hot spots in the Middle East, Africa and Asia as being among the worst offenders of press freedom. The journalism rights group also says there has been a significant decline in press freedom in the United States.

Reporters Without Borders says Syria has become an increasingly dangerous place for journalists during the nearly three-year conflict between the government and the opposition.

The group's U.S. director, Delphine Halgand, said Syria ranks near the bottom of the index of 180 countries. "You have to keep in mind that more than 130 news providers have been killed in Syria since the start of the conflict in March 2011, including 45 since last year. On top of that, at least 16 foreign reporters and 26 journalism providers are right now detained, kidnapped or missing," she said.

Elsewhere, Halgand said a "privatization of violence" is problematic in some African countries.

"What we mean is that non-state groups are the main source of violence against the media. This is the case in many countries in Africa like the M23 in the [DRC] Congo or the al-Shabab group in Somalia," said Halgand.

Reporters Without Borders looked at factors including transparency, media independence and level of abuses in its annual ranking of countries.

It says government attempts to crack down on social media sites and bloggers played a role in Vietnam's low index ranking of 174.

Viet Youth for Democracy co-founder Huong Nguyen said several of her friends who are bloggers have been jailed for using social media to express their views.

"The thing with social media is that it is so difficult for the government to control what people are talking about and for people to use and to discuss public affairs in the social media. That is why there has been a lot of focus from the Vietnamese government on restricting the freedom of information on the Internet," she said.

Reporters Without Borders says a government "hunt" for leaks and whistleblowers played a role in propelling the U.S. ranking down 13 positions to 46 on the index.

Read the original post:
Media Group: Press Freedom Slipping in Some Countries

Top 10 ways to market your app
If you have an idea for developing an exciting new app, the best way to make it successful is through good marketing, here are top 10 ways to market your app...

By: Global Banking Finance Review

Follow this link:
Top 10 ways to market your app - Video