Bing accused of censoring Chinese language results outside China

[Guest realmayo]

MM, I'm not sure if you don't understand, or if it's all just 似是而非, or if you're 五毛党.

[Lu]

Wikipedia: the Dalai Lama article is actually open for editing. If there are facts missing there, feel free to correct it. No government or corporation is stopping you. Or consider the article on the Spratly Islands, which amazingly is also still open for editing. If there were censors on Wikipedia, they would have closed it. Wikipedia is moderated, yes, but there is no higher authority laying down the law, just a lot of people bickering, with the people who bicker the hardest getting their way.

The BBC article you cite (and the Douban article quoting it) is about the British government censoring a page on Wikipedia because there was an image of a naked child on it. That means that it's not Wikipedia censoring things in it, but the British government. Whether governments should ban pictures of naked children is no doubt an interesting discussion, but too far off topic.

I'm not going to touch the FLG stuff, that's a whole 'nother can of worms.

Google: Two articles on how Google doesn't give you sexual content unless you explicitly ask for it. Yah, I suppose that's a form of censorship. Porn is illegal in China as well actually. Also an article about Google not allowing automatic filling in of words when you search for torrent sites. Mind that apparently you can still search for those sites, Google just doesn't prompt you to. From what I know of those sites, torrents are usually illegal in most countries. Yah, I suppose that's censorship.

One article from 2007 saying that Google asks its board to vote down a proposal on forbidding censorship. This is both too old to be relevant here and doesn't say what was the outcome.

One article about Sweden wanting to include the word 'ungoogleable' in the dictionary and Google not liking that. That is not remotely related to censorship of Google.

One site that won't load for me.

And one instance of a video removed from Youtube, not Google.

Next time you try to provide references, please limit yourself to articles actually relevant to your argument. I'm willing to read stuff (up to a point) but I don't appreciate my time being wasted with articles from 2007 or about Swedish dictionaries.

Earlier you said 'It's THE search engine known for censorship, not just political but also financial. Certain companies can go from page 1 to page 234234 in a Google search with the same search terms overnight because Google added them to their "google censored" list.' Now your argument is that Google censors because it's reluctant to give you porn and torrent sites and makes you explicitly ask for it?

Edit to add: And the NSA spies on us. Yes, that's not news either, it's bad, and it's also not relevant to the discussion at hand.

[skylee]

Love you, Lu.

PS - I love baidu too. It is great for finding pirated stuff. It almost never fails.

[MeiMay]

realmayo: I was encouraged to speak up and express my political opinions as long as I didn't do it in a forceful way. I tried it (in this thread for example) but despite doing it in a calm and peaceful way without being preachy it seemed to get the same extremely negative response. I was asked for proof of google and wikipedia being censored, i offered proof in the forms of links to news sources and the post offering proof got downvoted. i'm not here to get anyone to adopt my opinions, just taking part in the discussions. if I'm a 五毛党, what are you? 五粪党？五欧分党? I thought we were all just expressing our own opinions without anyone paying us to do it

Lu: I have tried to edit Wikipedia articles and for every edit I made I added 4-5 news articles as references. Every time both the edits and the references were deleted. They also deleted my comments in the discussion (though I was free to explain why I thought the deletions were unfair, but in the end they deleted all my comments and banned me for "vandalism".) I posted nothing inappropriate. Just because an article seems open for edits doesn't mean they let edits stand, I hope you aren't naive enough to think that. This is my personal experience and it's true. If you don't believe it, I can't help you, but whether I can prove it or not I know for sure that Wikipedia censors articles. If you really want to investigate it I can try to find the original news articles and tell you what edits to make and see for yourself. I can guarantee the edits will get removed. One of the articles was FLG. The news sources include the New York Times so don't think they were all Chinese sources.

Lu, about the wikipedia article, I'm sorry, I copied the link in a hurry. I honestly didn't even read it, apparently I made a mistake.

I was linking to proof of censorship, not proof of censorship "worse than China" or "according to China".

Torrents can be used to share legal content as well, but that obviously doesn't bother you. I'm not sure it bothers me either, just noting.

You do know that Google owns and runs Youtube, right?

[Lu]

Realmayo: I'm quite convinced MM is not a 五毛 actually.

Lu, about the wikipedia article, I'm sorry, I copied the link in a hurry. I honestly didn't even read it

Yes, I suspected as much. Same for several of the other articles, I assume. Apologies appreciated, and for the future please note that a list of links does not an argument make.

That you failed to make certain edits you liked doesn't mean Wikipedia is censored (who would be 'censoring' it?). I left the Dutch Wikipedia after getting into an argument about stupid things they didn't want to correct. Doesn't mean the place is censored. If you had the same tone and belligerence there as you have here, that's probably part of the reason.

Now. What is your argument? Google doesn't like you searching for porn and torrent sites (but does let you if you really want to)? Google is 'known for censorship, not just political but also financial', as you said earlier? And what are the reasons you think this is the case? Can you support these reasons with facts?

And if your phone won't let you make paragraphs, consider posting from a computer if that helps.

[Yorin]

gato: Google is known to be extremely political and selective. It's THE search engine known for censorship, not just political but also financial.

 

 

Censorship for whom? I just typed "Bush is" and "Obama is" into the Google search engine to see what autocomplete would suggest. The result is a broad range of suggestions from "war criminal" and "nazi" to "alien" and to "monkey" and so on.

 

If what you say is true, are there results such as these for Hu Jintao or Xi Jinping in a Chinese search engine?

[querido]

You should still be able to make paragraphs with periods.

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Like this.

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Byebye. :-)

[MeiMay]

Lu: I am using a computer! it still swallows my line breaks... what reason beyond financial is there for censoring torrent sites? torrent sites share lots of legal content. there are many artists who choose to share their demo albums or even full albums is some cases as torrents (for free). most operating systems (excluding windows and os/x of course) have torrent links on their official websites so you can download them via torrents. the argument/insinuation above that torrents are somehow illegal by nature doesn't stand when you look at the facts.

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testing

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querido's

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theory.

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Yorin: http://www.baidu.com/s?wd=%E8%83%A1%E9%94%A6%E6%B6%9B%E6%98%AF%E4%B8%80%E4%B8%AA%E5%A4%96%E6%98%9F%E4%BA%BA&ie=utf-8&nojs=1

yes, you can write "Hu Jin Tao is an alien" and get results. 哈哈哈

not that I understand why you would want to search for something like that.

The point wasn't if Chinese search engines are censored. Of course they are. The point was that so are Western search engines. Wikipedia has a whole article that lists the ways Google censors things. I'm just one person, I don't think I can find more ways than the many people who wrote the wikipedia article. But if so many ways of censoring are already openly listed and found out, do you think it's impossible there are many more ways in which google results and websites are censored? I hope you understand that censorship doesn't always mean "removing results". Sometimes it means "rearranging results to subtly affect opinion" combined with profiling in the way of "only communists would click on page 5, good Americans won't go beyond page 3".

yorin: what about Li Hongzhi is? what does it give you when you search for Falun Gong wishing for the death of more Chinese people? cheering for the Sichuan eathquakes and celebrating everyone who died there? tibetan terrorists? tibetan youth congress and guerrilla warfare? armed attacks on Chinese trains carrying food and supplies to Tibet? Li Hongzhi saying he believes in naked women floating in outer space? and so on... maybe they no longer censor anything China related, who knows. I don't use Google and I don't have interest in checking. if you feel I'm wrong you can check for yourself. beyond that I think I have nothing else to say. All I wanted to say is that all search engines are censored in some way. That is proven to be true by people a lot smarter than me. if my links weren't enough search for more (if you don't get results, change your search engine...)

ps. i don't search for porn... but baidu gives plenty of results like that. i've noticed it sometimes even when searching for something else... i haven't tried from inside China but I'm not sure why baidu would have porn related search results outside China but not inside.

edit: maybe some of the misunderstandings disappear if I say that I also think of systematic bias as a form of censorship. you can have severe bias and still have discussion full of opposing opinions because the opinions are all opposing each other within a limited scope. example would be if all the political opinions that weren't US democrat or republican were deleted. you would still have plenty of disagreement and seemingly open debate but in reality the majority of political opinion would still be excluded.

[mouse]

I have nothing to contribute to this discussion except to say that I think accusing other posters of being government stooges should be discouraged. It's something you see far too often on English language sites that discuss the PRC and I would have hoped users of this forum would be above that sort of thing.

[Yorin]

 

The point wasn't if Chinese search engines are censored. Of course they are. The point was that so are Western search engines. Wikipedia has a whole article that lists the ways Google censors things.

 

Your point wasn't "and so are Western search engines", your point was that Google was "THE search engine known for censorship".

And the longest paragraph on that Wikipedia page is about the censorship that Google was forced to implement for China.

 

 

yorin: what about Li Hongzhi is? what does it give you when you search for Falun Gong wishing for the death of more Chinese people? cheering for the Sichuan eathquakes and celebrating everyone who died there?

 

I'm not sure what your point is. A Google search gives me plenty of sites with criticism of Li Hongzhi and Falun Gong.

[MeiMay]

Then they don't censor those results I think. I haven't used Google in years, I stopped using it a long time ago for many reasons. I don't know how they have changed their policies over the years. i'm not even sure of everything they used to censor, I stopped paying attention after i stopped using the search engine.

ps. "forced" not true.

mouse: I agree, I think it's lowly behavior. "if you don't agree with me you must be a government stooge"

[Lu]

So can I conclude that you don't use Google, haven't done so in years, and that your argument that Google is 'THE search engine known for censorship' is entirely based on that Wikipedia article (half of which is filled with Google censoring things because of laws in some countries)? Come on, there is an argument to be made for Google censoring stuff, but you're not even close to making it. I never use Bing but I tried out the accusations before I posted in this thread, just so I knew what I was talking about. (Also I now know why I won't use Bing again, which is useful knowledge.) If you don't keep up with a subject and are not informed about it, that's up to you, but then you should also keep opinions on that subject to yourself because then you're simply not qualified to talk about it (until you have (re)informed yourself at least).

And even if it is tweaking results, I'm quite convinced that almost all of what Google does is with an eye on making money, and to that end, of making people find stuff they want. If hardly anyone is writing about or looking for XYZ but lots of people for ZYX, then if you type XYZ Google might send you to ZYX instead, but not because it thinks that's better or has an agenda or something, but because it thinks that that's probably what you're looking for. To call that censorship is rather pointless imo.

As to searching FLG stuff, when you type 'Falun Gong is' into Google, it actually suggests 'evil'. But if you write 'good' instead you find pro-FLG stuff. You can find Noam Chomsky, Li Hongzhi, 'the Dalai Lama is an idiot', and whatever else. Do go try looking for some things you think are censored, I honestly am interested if you find something.

[MeiMay]

gato(below): i think so too.

[gato]

It may be time to close this thread.