A new study by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab reveals that Microsoft’s Bing translation service in China employs stricter censorship measures than its Chinese counterparts, raising concerns about the tech giant’s operations in the country.
Rest of World reports that Microsoft’s Bing translation service in China has come under scrutiny following a groundbreaking study by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab. The research, shared exclusively with Rest of World, indicates that Bing’s censorship practices in China are more stringent than those of leading Chinese services, including Baidu Translate and Tencent Machine Translation.
The study’s findings challenge the common perception that U.S. tech companies might be more resistant to Chinese censorship demands than their local counterparts. Jeffrey Knockel, senior research associate at Citizen Lab, explained the severity of Bing’s censorship: “If you try to translate five paragraphs of text, and two sentences contain a mention of Xi, Bing’s competitors in China would delete those two sentences and translate the rest. In our testing, Bing always censors the entire output. You get a blank. It is more extreme.”
This extensive censorship extends beyond Bing’s translation service to its China-based search engine, which was found to censor more extensively than Chinese firms’ services. The implications of these practices are significant, as Knockel noted, “Microsoft’s practices harm people’s ability to communicate with an entire demographic of people.”
Microsoft has maintained a presence in China for over two decades, with its Windows operating system capturing more than 80 percent of the market share. Bing, while not the market leader, still holds a substantial 25 percent share of the search engine market in China, according to Statcounter.
The Citizen Lab study, which analyzed 10,000 unique censorship applications across five translation services, found that Bing is the only China-based translation service to consistently produce blank outputs when encountering sensitive content. In contrast, other services like Baidu, Tencent, and NetEase silently omit triggering sentences, while Alibaba displays an error message but still translates content once the user removes the sensitive text.
Benjamin Fung, a McGill University professor and expert on AI and cybersecurity technology, suggests that Microsoft’s approach may be driven by a desire to avoid Chinese government backlash. “On a technical level, censoring more is easier to achieve. They don’t have to detect exactly which phrase is sensitive. The software just has to make the binary decision: translate or not translate,” Fung explained to Rest of World.
The study also revealed that Microsoft may have recently expanded its China-based censorship. Newly discovered censored terms on Bing’s search engine include references to the September 2023 arrest of Chinese dissident Zheng Baocheng and the Bluebird Movement protests in Taiwan from the previous month.
Samm Sacks, senior fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, commented on the challenging position companies like Microsoft face: “Right now there is a lot of scrutiny in Washington on companies like Microsoft that serve both U.S. government markets and have deep connections to China. At the same time, the Chinese government is putting more pressure on foreign companies’ content controls. Companies like Microsoft have been trying to thread the needle for a long time. There’s not really a needle to thread anymore. You either comply with Chinese laws or not, and Microsoft has made the calculus that it is what they have to do to stay in China.”
Read more at Rest of World here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
