It was bad enough that Microsoft’s Bing search engine as used within China was censoring results in order to appease the Chinese Communist Party. Microsoft did and does censor search results delivered to users in China as part of the cost of doing business there (or because, in the deathless words of Apple Inc., the company is “obligated to follow the laws in the countries where we operate, even when we disagree”).
But in 2014, Bing was also plausibly accused—by GreatFire.org—of censoring search results throughout the world in a way that the CCP would appreciate.
Our latest research indicates that Microsoft’s search engine Bing is censoring English and Chinese language search on its home page in order to exclude certain results. We have also noticed that Bing is practicing subtle censorship with search results. In both instances, Bing is filtering out links and stories that the Chinese authorities would deem damaging….
It is doubtful that Bing’s censorship in China has been implemented in strict accordance with Chinese law…. But whose law is dictating the manipulation of search results for Americans who are using Bing in the United States? Or French who are using Bing in France?…
China Bing will censor results if the site is accessed from within China. We disapprove of this practice but find it understandable given stringent internet controls.
Below you can see the search results for “自由微博” (FreeWeibo) on Bing when accessed from the U.S. As you can see, at the bottom of the page, Bing states that “Some results have been removed”. Indeed, our homepage “freeweibo.com” is nowhere to be found. When conducting the same search on Google, our homepage is the first result….
We also searched on China Bing from the U.S. The server for China Bing is located in the U.S. As both the server and the user are located outside of China, Microsoft should have no reason to practice self-censorship. But in practice, this censorship notice is displayed: “Due to legal obligations imposed by Chinese laws and regulations, we have removed specific results for these search terms….”
Microsoft denied that it was censoring Bing results outside of China. “Bing does not apply China’s legal requirements to searches conducted outside of China. Due to an error in our system, we triggered an incorrect results removal notification for some searches noted in the report but the results themselves are and were unaltered outside of China.” How can removed results be a manifestation of unaltered results?
Replying to the denial, GreatFire.org noted that The Guardian had “confirmed our testing results concerning the 达赖喇嘛 (Dalai Lama) and did their own tests for 薄熙来 (Bo Xilai). The newspaper reported: ‘A search on Bing in Chinese for Bo Xilai (薄熙来), the former high-flying Chinese government official now serving life imprisonment for corruption, shows equally different results. The top search result is again Baidu Baike [a Chinese-language online encyclopedia]. Wikipedia is the third entry. There are no western reports on the politician on the front page. In English the search is topped by Wikipedia, then by stories from the New York Times, BBC and Financial Times. A Google search in Chinese starts with the Wikipedia page and then several news articles chronicling his downfall from sources including the BBC and Voice of America.’ ”
Whatever it did or didn’t do back then, Microsoft seemed to soon recalibrate its outside-of-China Bing search results. At least I find no reports that regular CCP-style censorship as documented by GreatFire.org and The Guardian persisted or reemerged after 2014.
But the censorship-friendly impulse or technical error or whatever it is did not fade out altogether. On June 4, 2021, for several hours Bing failed to show any of the famous images of Tank Man in response to searches for the term “tank man” made by users in different parts of the world. The problem, Microsoft said after being told about this, had been caused by “an accidental human error and has been resolved.” Images of the unidentified Chinese man blocking a row of tanks near Tiananmen Square returned to Bing’s non-China search results.
Delta et al.
Microsoft is not alone in helping the Chinese Communist Party to censor outside of China. In 2018, airlines based outside of China stopped referring to “Taiwan” (often used as a synonym of “Republic of China”) as an independent country simply because the Chinese government told them to and gave a deadline.
As Delta put it in an official statement confessing its acquiescence: “U.S. carriers, including Delta, are in the process of implementing website changes in response to the Civil Aviation Administration of China’s request. We will remain in close consultation with the U.S. government throughout this process.”
Years later, airlines are still pretending that Taiwan is part of mainland China.
“When people from Taiwan travel internationally, one frustrating experience they face happens long before they board a plane or check into a hotel,” Bloomberg reported in 2025. “Whether booking airline tickets, hotel reservations, or simply registering for a conference online, they are often forced to select their country of origin from a dropdown menu—and more often than not, what they see is ‘Taiwan, China’ or ‘Taiwan, Province of China.’
“This labeling isn’t just inaccurate—it’s deeply offensive to many Taiwanese and factually misleading. Taiwan is a vibrant democracy with a population of over 23 million people, its own government, passport, currency, and military. And yet, in the digital age, many international platforms still misrepresent it as a subregion of another country.”
Zoom
In June 2020, it was reported that the Zoom meeting platform had temporarily blocked the account of a Chinese human rights activist then living in the United States who had been using Zoom to hold a commemoration of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Some of the participants were in China, some in the United States. Presumably in response to publicity, Zoom then restored the activist’s account.
The company nebulously commented: “It is not in Zoom’s power to change the laws of governments opposed to free speech. However, Zoom is committed to modifying its processes to further protect its users from those who wish to stifle their communications.”
The New York Times noted that China “has increasingly sought ways to squelch discourse beyond the country’s borders.”
Zoom’s collaboration with the Chinese censors turned out to be more thoroughgoing than at first revealed. Later in 2020, federal prosecutors accused a Zoom executive based in China “of working with Chinese government to surveil users and suppress video calls…. Prosecutors said the China-based executive, Xinjiang Jin, worked as Zoom’s primary liaison with Chinese law enforcement and intelligence services, sharing user information and terminating video calls at the Chinese government’s request.”
Quoting from electronic messages between Jin and other Zoom employees, FBI agents outlined a months-long, high-pressure campaign by China’s “Internet Police” to view users’ video calls and suppress unwanted speech.
In the complaint, FBI agents said that Zoom employees in the U.S. had agreed to a Chinese government “rectification” plan that entailed migrating data on roughly 1 million users from the U.S. to China, thereby subjecting it to Chinese law. Zoom also agreed, the complaint states, to provide “special access” to Chinese law enforcement and national-security authorities. In one message cited in the complaint, Jin wrote that the authorities had wanted him to share detailed lists of the company’s “daily monitoring” of “Hong Kong demonstrations, illegal religions” and other subjects.
To terminate the Tiananmen Square calls, the complaint alleges, Jin’s co-conspirators fabricated evidence that they were intended to discuss child abuse, racism, terrorism and violence.
According to John Demers, an assistant attorney general, the Zoom case illustrates “the choices that companies are forced to make when they do business in China [and] how the Chinese government will take advantage of the leverage they have over you to push their agenda. You’ve got a consistent pattern of the Chinese government using economic leverage—the opportunity to access markets, foreign investments—in order to further political goals.”
Spotify and Apple Music
In 2024, Spotify and Apple Music globally censored the Hong Kong protest anthem “Glory to Hong Kong” even though it had been banned only in Hong Kong (or only in China).
“They just give in, saying it’s just one song, not Taylor Swift’s entire back catalog,” a lawyer and musician, Adrian Chow, told Radio Free Asia. “Maybe when their legal departments found out how little income it makes, they felt it wasn’t worth the risk…as the legal fees [in case of a lawsuit] would far exceed any income from the song.”
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