Microsoft censoring Bing’s sexy Arabic search results

ONI's partial list of banned Bing search results

The tens of millions of Arabic-speaking users of Microsoft’s popular Bing search engine have a problem. When it comes to searching for gay rights in Egypt, breast-feeding information in Algeria or sex advice in Jordan, they are out of luck. Bing is censoring search results in the Arab-speaking world, according to a prominent American research organization. The ban applies to search results in both Arabic and English found using Bing’s Arab portal.

A partial list of banned terms is shown above. But here’s the big problem… all the evidence points to Microsoft voluntarily censoring their search engine. No Arab countries asked them to censor search results. According to the Open Net Institute:

Microsoft’s explanation as to why some search keywords return few or no results is that “[s]ometimes websites are deliberately excluded from the results page to remove inappropriate content as determined by local practice, law, or regulation.” It is unclear, however, whether Bing’s keyword filtering in the Arab countries is an initiative from Microsoft, or whether any or all of the Arab states have asked Microsoft to comply with local censorship practices or laws.

It is interesting that Microsoft’s implementation of this type of wholesale social content censorship for the entire “Arabian countries” region is in fact not being practiced by many of the Arab government censors themselves. That is, although political filtering is widespread in the MENA region, social filtering, including keyword filtering, is not practiced by all countries in MENA. ONI 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 testing and research found no evidence of social content filtering (e.g., sex, nudity, and homosexuality) at the national level in countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, and Libya.

Meanwhile, MIT’s Technology Review parsed the Open Net report and found something very interesting. It seems that Microsoft is obsessed with the gays:

ONI performed the study by testing the search terms inside the countries. Banned words include “sex,” ” “intercourse,” “breast,” “nude,” and many more in both the English and Arabic language. The investigators also made a curious discovery: Bing engineers remembered to bar ordinary Arabs from searching for the word “penis” but not for the word “vagina.” But they left no stone unturned when it came to blocking words that might lead to sites having to do with homosexuality.

Local portal of Bings in nearly all countries or languages allow users to choose whether to use “safe search” or not. Arabic has the dubious distinction of being the only language in which users are forced to use a “nanny filter.”

Among other Arabic-speaking countries, Egypt, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon and Libya do not require search engine filtering at the national level. So, it seems, Microsoft threw internet users in those country under the bridge in order to please Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Andy Greenberg notes that Microsoft is hypocritically a member of the Global Network Initative, which fights against censorship around the world. So why the embrace of sweeping web search censorship? Unlike rivals Google and Yahoo, Microsoft is a prolific pay-software producer with extensive sales in hyperconservative Arab countries. Despite piracy being endemic in the greater Middle East, Microsoft still makes a pretty penny there.

So what is a Bing-loving Egyptian to do when he wants to search for porn? Well, Microsoft strangely decided to filter based on domain destination rather than IP address… the regular US-based Bing page still provides sexxay search results to anyone in the Arab-speaking world who opens it.