Microsoft could be censoring Chinese search results on Bing in the U.S.

Microsoft’s search engine Bing may be censoring some search results in Chinese, even when the searcher is in the United States. When searching for a term that’s controversial in China, like the Dalai Lama, Bing displays very different results if you search in Chinese than in English. The filtered searches were first noticed by activists at GreatFire, an anti-censorship group in China, and first reported by The Guardian.

Microsoft’s search engine Bing appears to be censoring information for Chinese language users in the US in the same way it filters results in mainland China. 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. These include Dalai Lama, June 4 incident (how the Chinese refer to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989), Falun Gong and FreeGate, a popular internet workaround for government censorship.