Microsoft’s new “decision engine” Bing may help users get through clutter on the Internet to make better decisions, but officials in China have made it clear that the software behemoth has failed at one decision: to make snippets of sexually explicit material available in search results.
Bing includes a small video-preview feature called smart motion preview, which plays videos when a user navigates over it. The feature, while convenient for some, has landed Microsoft in hot water with some child-advocacy groups, including Virginia-based Enough is Enough.
And now, China has blocked Bing because of that same video-search feature.
Filtering and Blocking
In recent months, China’s Internet Illegal Information Reporting Center, or CIIRC, has taken steps to filter and block images from the eyes of Internet users in China. Most recently, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has directed personal computers sold in the country to include filtering software to protect minors ages 10 through 16 by filtering pornographic and violent images and content.
Flickr and Twitter have also been blocked over the past several months, while Google-owned YouTube has been blocked since March.
Steven Lin, a marketing professional in Beijing and former journalist at the Economic Observer, has accounts on Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and Google, which he could not access because they had been blocked recently.
Lin, however, said “Flickr and Twitter [have] come back to life in mainland [China] shortly after the sensitive period,” referencing the 20-year anniversary of the attacks on Tiananmen Square.
Lin recently tweeted about Microsoft’s Bing also being blocked in China.
“Microsoft’s Bing.com was among several Internet services that were blocked for customers in China on June 2,” said Kevin Kutz, Microsoft’s director of public affairs. “We are reaching out to the government to understand this decision and to find a way to move forward. As a charter member of…