Tiananmen tank picture censored by Bing ‘in error’

MICROSOFT blamed “human error” for its search engine not showing image results for “tank man” after censorship concerns around the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Users in the UK, US, Germany and Singapore said that when they made the search Bing returned “There are no results for tank man”, on Friday.

David Greene, at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said content moderation was impossible to do perfectly and “egregious mistakes are made all the time”. But he added: “At worst, this was purposeful suppression at the request of a powerful state.”

Hours after Microsoft acknowledged the issue, the “tank man” search returned only pictures of tanks elsewhere in the world.

“Tank man” is used to describe the person standing before tanks in China’s Tiananmen Square during pro-democracy demonstrations in June 1989.

Microsoft said the issue was “due to an accidental human error and we are actively working to resolve this”.

Rival Google showed many results for the image when the “tank man” search was performed on Friday.

Many of the Microsoft employees who work on Bing are based in China, including some who work on imagerecognition. China requires search engines to censor results.