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Microsoft’s Bing is the second most popular search engine in China, a market that Google exited years ago. Today, Bing remains as the only Western search engine accessible there. But success has meant having to make significant compromises on issues such as censorship.

On today’s Big Take podcast, Bloomberg’s Ryan Gallagher gives us one of the first comprehensive, inside accounts of Bing’s sophisticated censorship system in China, and how it’s centered on an expanding blacklist of websites, words and phrases. 

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Here is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation:

Oanh Ha: Hey Ryan!Ryan Gallagher: Hi Oanh. How are you?

Oanh Ha: I'm good, thanks. So what are we doing this morning?Ryan Gallagher:  We're gonna take a look at the Chinese version of Bing and assess the censorship that Microsoft has built into it.

Oanh Ha: 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?

Ryan Gallagher:  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.bing.com.

Oanh Ha: Alright, got that. 

Ryan Gallagher:  Search for Tiananmen Square massacre.

Oanh Ha: Okay.Ryan Gallagher:  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 the same censorship integrated within it. So we can compare the results that both of us are seeing. 

Oanh Ha:  This will be interesting. So what do you see there?

Ryan Gallagher:  Yeah, well, I see the top link here is to Wikipedia, and it's an article in 1989, Tiananmen 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 Tiananmen Square.

Oanh Ha:  The Tiananmen Square massacre was a student-led protest that was brutally repressed in Beijing in 1989. Demonstrators called for economic and political reform peacefully for weeks, but in the end, the Chinese military was brought in and killed the protesters en masse. It is one of the most sensitive and heavily censored topics in China, one that the Chinese government wants nobody to remember.Oanh Ha:  Just to be clear on my page, there’s nothing that alludes to massacre or violence or student protest or certainly deaths and the top search that shows up on Bing in China is the ballast for the ark of world peace and justice.Ryan Gallagher:  Yeah, and this is what you find is very, very striking difference between the version that I could see and the version that you can see. What's actually happened with the version of Bing 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.

Oanh Ha:  Today on the show: Microsoft’s decade-long compliance with China’s censorship regulations and an inside account of the system the company has built. This is the Big Take from Bloomberg News. I’m Oanh Ha.

Oanh Ha:  To be clear, Microsoft’s Bing is not the Google of China. The market is dominated by a Chinese search engine called Baidu. But Bing has been gradually growing its market share.

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

Oanh Ha:  And while other Western search engines such as Google are completely blocked by China, Microsoft’s Bing stands out because it’s still accessible on the mainland.

Ryan Gallagher: Bing 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 is really significant, especially in the current sort of political environment there is a lot of tension between China and the United States.

Oanh Ha:  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.

Ryan Gallagher:  Yeah, the story is based on years of reporting and cultivating all kinds of sources, current and former people who work for Microsoft right up to the executive level.

Oanh Ha:  Throughout Ryan’s reporting, he found that censorship on Bing China covers an array of topics way beyond politics.

Ryan Gallagher:  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.

Oanh Ha:  Back in 1992, Microsoft was one of the first American companies to set up such a big business operation in China.Ryan Gallagher:  They really went all in. And Bill Gates, the co-founder, has always been a very big proponent of investing in China and growing his business in China.

Oanh Ha:  The company spent years cultivating and building connections, and finally won government approval to run the search engine. But the timing of Bing’s China launch was peculiar. It went live on June 1, 2009, just three days before the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. 

Ryan Gallagher:  Yeah, pretty bad timing, 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 1989. So tensions always ramp up at this period. 

Oanh Ha:  The Chinese government was on high alert for anything on the internet related to the Tiananmen Square protests. Meanwhile, at Microsoft… 

Ryan Gallagher:  They have everything set up. They've got all the approvals in place, they have all the infrastructure, a really big infrastructure, all the servers, it's all ready to go online. And when they, you know, finally push 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. And anyone trying to visit the site is getting an error page. It vanishes.

Oanh Ha:  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 a flurry of phone calls between Microsoft’s lawyers and Chinese government officials, an explanation emerged.Ryan Gallagher:  The Chinese government was feeling so worried about the launch of this search engine, just before the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, 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.

Oanh Ha:   And the blocking of Bing wasn’t just about sensitivities around the Tiananmen Square massacre.Ryan Gallagher:  Well, I think it was probably a very deliberate strategy by the Chinese government to kind of show who was boss in a way. They were trying to, you know, they were trying to say, look, we're in control here, not you.Oanh Ha:  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.

Ryan Gallagher:  A lot of the censorship that we see on Bing China is self censorship, is Microsoft choosing which topics to remove. What I was told was that their position was that they would just over-censor, they would over-filter, because that was the easier thing to do rather than having Bing pulled offline again.

Oanh Ha:  In response to Ryan’s story, Microsoft said in a statement, “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 to operating under China’s restrictions, Google was giving up. In 2010, following an attack on its infrastructure, Google decided to quit China, citing the censorship and cybersecurity concerns.

Ryan Gallagher:  And it was a really massive cyberattack 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 the Chinese version of Google was just increasing exponentially. And they couldn’t tolerate that, so Google ended up leaving and Bing was left there.

Oanh Ha:  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 Bing.

Bill Gates Archival: 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, so I think keeping the internet thriving there is very important. 

Oanh Ha:  A spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in Washington DC, said in a statement that China's internet is, "free, open, and orderly", and that it welcomed foreign companies to operate in the country. It added that foreign-invested enterprises in China should, “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?

Ryan Gallagher:  Well, it’s an authoritarian government, it’s 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 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.

Oanh Ha:  And really giving people access to only a slice of reality, right? Not everything that's out there.Ryan Gallagher:  Yeah. And Beyond. I think, beyond a slice of reality, it's like an alternative reality. It's a reality that is filtered through Chinese Communist Party glasses, if you like, you know. It’s 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 Bing in China.

Oanh Ha: 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.Ryan Gallagher:  So the technology behind the filtering system, we were told involves a combination of machine learning so it can have 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.

Oanh Ha:  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. 

Ryan Gallagher:  Independent groups like the Citizen Lab, and they've assessed like upwards of 100,000 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 Baidu, which I found extraordinary, you know, that an American search engine would be censoring more than the domestic Chinese ones.

Oanh Ha:  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 some occasions, Microsoft did push back on government censorship. In 2013, it stopped operating a blacklist that blocked people from using certain words in its Chinese version of Skype. That prompted China to ban the service. And in 2021, Microsoft shut down the Chinese version of LinkedIn after criticism that it blocked reporters’ profiles.

Oanh Ha:  Ryan, is it plausible that Microsoft would ever shut down Bing?Ryan Gallagher:   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 from 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 Microsoft Edge internet browser, in China, you know, Bing is the default search engine on that. So it's like baked in to other products, so it makes it more complicated for them to just get rid of it.

Oanh Ha:  And then there’s the issue of labor.

Ryan Gallagher: Also, another reason that was 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 Bing, that's actually been done by people in China. So they’re not just working on the Chinese version, they’re also working on the international version. So if you get rid of Bing 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.

Oanh Ha:  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. In 2021, shortly before the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Microsoft accidentally applied the Chinese censorship filter globally. So when someone – no matter where they were in the world – tried to search for “tank man” on Bing – that’s the iconic image of the lone protester blocking a row of tanks – they were unable to find anything.

Ryan Gallagher: 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 they're 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 non-censored versions, whether accidentally or otherwise.

Oanh Ha:  In response to Ryan’s story, Microsoft said in a statement, “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. It said the alternative – leaving the market – would “cut people off from information they otherwise have through Bing”.  

Oanh Ha:  Ryan, 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 censor?

Ryan Gallagher: This is the tightrope 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 the extent of the censorship, and it's actually shocking. 

So the question of, you know, is it possible to have a more moderated version of it? I think the answer is probably no, because that's what has been tried. Google tried to do it, Bing, they've tried to do it. 

And what you would really need is for a fundamental change in the government itself, because really at the root of this is the government. And Microsoft isn't in control of what the Chinese government is doing.Oanh Ha:  And for now, they seem to be okay with it.Ryan Gallagher:  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 gonna be there.

Have questions or comments for the team? Reach us at bigtake@bloomberg.net.

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