Bing e la censura

Nicholas Kristof scrive sul suo blog “On the Ground” del perchè boicottare Bing, il motore di ricerca di Microsoft:

But conduct the search with the simplified characters used in mainland China, then you get sanitized pro-Communist results. This is especially true of image searches. Magic! No Tiananmen Square massacre. The Dalai Lama becomes an oppressor. Falun Gong believers are villains, not victims.
What’s most offensive is that this is true wherever in the world the search is conducted – including in my office in New York. If Microsoft felt it had to bow to Chinese censorship within China’s borders, based on the IP address, that might be defensible. But when Microsoft skews its worldwide searches to make Hu Jintao feel better, that’s a disgrace. It becomes simply a unit of the Central Committee Propaganda Department.

A quanto pare cercando su Bing (che in China si chiama “biying”) con la lingua cinese i risultati sembrano alterati. Microsoft dice che è un bug: c’è da crederci?