14 DAY TRIAL // Bing is rapidly gaining ground in the search business, and stats show that it has recently managed to achieve a 20 percent market share, but just like any other service that’s growing, it also has to deal with all kinds of accusations coming from various organizations across the world.
This time, the Electronic Frontier Foundation claims that Microsoft is censoring adult-related Bing search results in some Arab countries, only six years after such restrictions were first imposed in the region.
Now everyone in these countries trying to search for sex- or LGTB-related content on Bing is provided with an error saying, “Your country or region requires a strict Bing SafeSearch setting, which filters out results that might return adult content. To learn more about SafeSearch requirements in your country or region, see How Bing Delivers Search Results.”
A click on an adjacent link provides us with more information on this restriction:
“Bing categorizes certain countries as strict markets. In these strict markets, we might restrict the display of adult content (as locally defined), and because of the local customs, norms, and laws, we might limit SafeSearch settings only to ‘strict.’ Set to ‘strict,’ SafeSearch filters the display of explicit search results in images, videos, and text.”
Countries that Microsoft says are targeted by these restrictions are China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Middle East, Singapore, Thailand, and Turkey.
“Microsoft going above and beyond the law”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that Microsoft is not necessarily complying with legal requirements when blocking access to such content, as in some countries, the company wasn’t requested to impose filters for adult-related searches.
“While in some cases Microsoft may limit search due to legal requests, in other cases, it does so because someone at the company has decided what the local norms or customs of a given country are. This is obviously problematic: Microsoft is going above and beyond the legal requirements of at least some of the countries in the region. Neither Egypt nor Lebanon, for example, block most sexual content or require intermediaries to do so,” the EFF says.
Microsoft is yet to provide a statement on these new claims, but we’ve reached out to the company and will update the article, should we receive an answer.