Microsoft’s Bing search engine showed no image results for the query “tank man” in the UK, US and elsewhere on Friday, users reported, raising concerns about possible censorship around the Tiananmen Square crackdown anniversary.
“Tank man” is often used to name an unidentified person famously pictured standing before tanks in China’s Tiananmen Square during pro-democracy demonstrations in June 1989.
Microsoft said the issue was “due to an accidental human error and we are actively working to resolve this.”
Queries in multiple other countries also provided no results, while in some cases, results surfaced showing pictures of tanks but without showing the famous image from 1989.
China is known to require search engines operating in its jurisdiction to censor results, but those restrictions are rarely applied elsewhere.
Rival Google showed several applicable results for “tank man” on Friday. Other search engines which use Bing, including Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, were also affected by the issue.
June 4 marks the 32nd anniversary of the crackdown on pro-democracy protestors in Beijing, commemorations of which are banned in China.
Bing, unlike Google, Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia, is not blocked in China and Microsoft censors the website’s results in the country. It was briefly knocked offline in January 2019, in what appeared to be a government effort, although the service was restored.
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