There are no results for tank man | Hacker News Reader

There are no results for tank man

bing.com

2,105 pointsrcoveson534 comments

@dang, I think we need an explanation for why Tank Man-related content on Hacker News has been disappearing all day. I usually trust HN to be a bastion of free speech, and if there isn't some kind of proportionate response here, I don't believe myself or many others here will be able to see it that way going forward.

EDIT: Thank you for your response, dang. Hacker News is a special place, which is why we have responded so strongly to today's events - I apologize if the tone above came off as less-than-civil. I (and it seems, many others) look forward to hearing more about the 'dupe' article others have linked to below. It was only upon seeing the article marked as a dupe after seeing the previous flagged out of existence that it began to feel like more than just a user-initiated action, so I am sure further information on the mod-initiated actions will put these fears to rest.

This post is on the front page right now (edit: and now also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783) - that's the opposite of "disappearing". I'd have to see links to the other ones.

Here's one tip for you guys, from years-long, world-weary experience: if you're coming up with sensational explanations in breathless excitement, it's almost certainly untrue.

Edit: ok, here's what happened. Users flagged https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925. When you see [flagged] on a submission, you should assume users flagged it because with rare exceptions, that's always why.

A moderator saw that, but didn't look very closely and thought "yeah that's probably garden-variety controversy/drama" and left the flags on. No moderator saw any of the other posts until I woke up, turned on HN, and—surprise!—saw the latest $outrage.

Software marked https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028 a dupe for the rather esoteric reasons explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397622. After that, the current post got upvoted to the front page, where it remains.

In other words, nothing was co-ordinated and the dots weren't connected. This was just the usual stochastic churn that generates HN. Most days it generates the HN you're used to and some days (quite a few days actually) it generates the next outlier, but that's how stochastics work, yes? If you're a boat on a choppy sea, sometimes some waves slosh into the boat. If you're a wiggly graph, sometimes the graph goes above a line.

If I put myself in suspicious shoes, I can come up with objections to the above, but I can also answer them pretty simply: this entire thing was a combo of two data points, one borderline human error [1] and one software false positive. We don't know how to make software that doesn't do false positives and we don't know how to make humans that don't do errors. And we don't know how to make those things not happen at the same time sometimes. This is what imperfect systems do, so it's not clear to me what needs changing. If you think something needs changing, I'm happy to hear it, but please make it obvious how you're not asking for a perfect system, because I'm afraid that's not an option.

[1] I will stick up for my teammate and say that this point is arguable; I might well have made the same call and it's far from obvious that it was the wrong call at the time. But we don't need that for this particular answer, so I'll let that bit go.

I don't doubt posts are flagged by users as opposed to moderation.

But at the same time, it also seems like flagging can be too easily abused, and can lead to accusations of censorship and distrust. (Though I've certainly seen it work well in cases, especially for false/defamatory articles.)

But it really does seem like we're at the point where longstanding users need to also be able to vouch for flagged stories, or something like that. And even if that doesn't automatically restore the story, it could at least show a label like "pending moderator decision" or something.

At a time where trust in the media and authority is low... a little bit of greater transparency might go a long way. :)

As it is too late to edit my comment, I wanted to write this here, rather than sending a private email, dang.

I apologize if the questions of myself and other users on this site today has set you on edge - and I am sure that today, in public and in private, you have seen many ugly things that the majority of us do not, and you reasonably draw a trend-line. I believe that you should extend the same charity of trend-spotting in the other direction.

We live in tumultuous times, and the speed at which the ratchet is moving seems to be ever-increasing. There are significant concerns, as I know you know, about censorship abroad, and also at home in various western countries. I believe the overwhelming outpouring you have seen today has been in response to one undeniable fact -- that even a genuine accident on the part of some engineer somewhere could apply CCP (or any country's ruling party) censorship globally is a line in the sand that many did not realize had been already been crossed.

Whether accidental or intentional, this is a watershed moment in the debate over censorship and freedom. It seems likely there are many more such errors in configuration actively deployed right now. That we have no way of knowing what, or how many such incidents there are is an existential threat to non-authoritarian systems of governance across the globe.

To see something that seemed unthinkable even a few months ago - that Tank Man could be censored in western countries on the anniversary in remembrance of the struggles he literally stood for - crossed a threshold for me in terms of what I believed could be possible more broadly. To see the extremely reasonable discussion around it disappear from hacker news, and stay dead for hours (I note that both the inappropriately-flagged article and the accidentally-marked-as-dupe article both still maintain those statuses at the time of this writing [EDIT: The flagged article's status was changed a few minutes after. Thank you, dang. Doing so does not mean you are re-writing history, and we appreciate it]) made it feel like it had encroached even closer to home than I had suspected.

It made it feel like perhaps I'd been even more naive than I had ever imagined. I'm sure you must feel the same way, after some of the more hateful things I'm sure you heard today.

All of this is to say that I treasure the community that you have played the single largest role in shaping, and your explanations have completely satisfied me.

I apologize for the way your day turned out, and any negative ways in which I have contributed towards that.

Here you go:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 [Flagged]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028 [Marked as dupe]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394943 [Currently on page 2]

Somewhat refreshing to see the normally mild-mannered dang show a flash of annoyance at conspiratorial thinking for once.

Thanks for your consistently even-handed and dedicated moderation efforts sir.

Many are wondering why this was marked as dupe:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028

We were told the same thing about the lab leak theory from: Social media companies, Mainstream media, and the government.

The reason for distrust is valid. We live in an age of rapidly increasing censorship and the CCPs growing reach of control in American discourse. Skepticism is becoming the default for very real reasons.

A proposal for a vouching system, since others suggested the idea but not an implementation: Any user can "vouch" for an article. This gets stored in a database, but doesn't do much on it's own. There's a secret karma cutoff, above which the vouch gets "counted", and if there's more vouches than flags a moderator is alerted to give the article extra attention.

Any time vouching triggers extra attention, the decision is recorded in the database. If someone routinely vouches and gets overruled (i.e. vouching for bad content), then their vouching no longer counts in the future.

At some point after the system is introduced, start giving extra weight to people whose vouching decisions line up with moderators.

Worst case, this is just flagging stuff for extra moderation attention so there's not a lot to abuse. If it's requiring too much extra attention, adjust the required vouch:flagged ratio or raise the threshold needed to vouch "For Real".

(I'm not saying I see anything wrong with the current system - I tend to appreciate how well this particular Walled Garden is tended to. But the vouch idea seemed cool to me, and I felt like I could contribute a useful implementation)

Flagging amounts to anonymous moderation, which is why you see a lot of conspiratorial responses to it. Users have no way to know who is removing a post from acceptable discussion via flagging.

One possible way to address this is to make visible a list of users who flagged a post. The arguments against this are obvious. But without such information, in the end you have to accept one result of anonymous moderation is the generation of conspiracy theories.

It's a tradeoff, of course.

I'm curious if tank man posts got flagged an unusual amount of times?

" if you're coming up with sensational explanations in breathless excitement, it's almost certainly untrue."

Spoil the fun...fun at some one else's expense... Your expense, sigh. Spoil away

I always really appreciate and learn from the measured perspectives you share here. It really is a bastion in a world that has recently been pretty crazy. Thanks a lot for your hard work, dang.

This guy gets it. So rational and reasonable. The only true authority is knowledge, respect.

Do not attribute to malice what can be attributed to stochastic co-ordination

Oh, you have multiple mods now? I thought it was just you, after sctb left.

Tool like the one developed by @janmo could be of some help to visualize theses kind of moderation incidents.

https://upvotetracker.com/post/hn/27395635

Related Show HN by @janmo: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27092770

Edit: I'm not sure I'm a big fan of his current sponsoring link however... maybe worth a look too.

Modern censorship relies on using online communities' reporting, flagging and moderating systems to the censor's advantage.

It almost feel like the only sane moderation system is to expose as much information as possible to all users? as much as the moderators have?

Why is flagging anonymous?

> latest $outrage

Or the latest minor symptom of a chronic illness.

This wouldn’t have happened, accidentally or not, if it wasn’t for the continuing and constant bullying of the Chinese government, and the willingness of international actors to kowtow to it.

HN is not a bastion of free speech and it is not meant to be. Controversial topics are routinely flagged because they incite flame wars and downvoting because you disagree is considered acceptable.

However, in this particular case, I don't think it should be flagged unless the comment sections becomes unmanageable. It may be a political topic but it is seen from a technical angle, and indeed, a lot of the comments are technical in nature: the effect of different options, different engines, alternative wording, etc...

What I think is interesting is how artificial the censorship looks. If I see no results for such a simple phrase, I know something fishy is going on and that would encourage me to carry on.

From someone with several years of moderate volume online community moderation, the issue with post-hoc censorship is radicalization.

If something disappears, no one has bad feelings about it.

If something two people are arguing over disappears, then two people carry simmering resentment about it (ironically, likely more than if their verbal spat had reached a cathartic conclusion), that eventually manifests in their next comments, and which ultimately leads to an erosion of common decency and civility.

It's a fine line, but it's definitely a line rather than right vs wrong.

FWIW, 'right to speech' != 'right to be heard' and 'freedom of speech' != 'freedom from consequences.'

Saying/posting something which quickly gets flagged into oblivion is freedom of speech working as intended. As is subsequent posts overcoming a flagging brigade...

It looks like the main reason why the first Ask HN story ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 ) disappeared was because it was flagged.

But that's just the surface reason. The deeper reason is because of HN's design which seems to weight flags much more heavily than up votes. This means that a non-trivial minority can successfully drag a story off the homepage, even if a majority believes it is important and worthy of discussion, and even if the comments are actually constructive.

Unfortunately we are not able to see what the count of flags are, and I don't know the scoring algorithm to see what portion of minority is needed to make a story disappear, or if it is even greater than a fixed portion (i.e. whether flag count may have a greater than linear effect, compared to linear support from up votes).

I have heard the rationale of attempting to avoid flame wars and heated discussion of controversial topics, but I'm not sure that it's the only way or worth the price of making things important to most of the community disappear. So far, follow up submissions seem to still be on the home page, but as I write this comment, I can see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 already drop from the top position down to #6 and I wonder if it will disappear also.

I hope that HN may reconsider what options are available to keep discussion constructive and useful while still allowing important topics to be seen and discussed without being buried by a minority.

Edit - 2 additional notes a few minutes later:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27396783 has now dropped more than halfway off the front page.

- Whoever downvoted this comment, please consider responding as well.

HN is not a "bastion of free speech", one of its most distinguishing features is the extensive moderation implemented to suppress spam, trolls, and rancor. A platform like reddit or even Twitter is far more welcoming to diverse discussion than HN, but this is an intentional decision by the site operators to maintain a certain threshold of discussion quality.

> I usually trust HN to be a bastion of free speech

You must have a remarkably selective definition of free speech then. Stuff gets flagged all the time, and users are suppressed via opaque and obfuscated methods.

To be clear, I'm not saying that moderation is a bad thing. But increasingly I notice that people use the term "free speech" to simply mean "speech I agree with".

I believe the principle of charity is enshrined in the HN guidelines. There's no need to assume ill intent here, either on my part or on the part of many others who believe in the bedrock, foundational principle of free speech. I don't see how you could make the connection that being outraged that China has managed to censor search results nearly globally on one of the top-three search engines on the day of the anniversary of the event being censored could be interpreted as arguing for only 'speech I agree with'.

"Political" or "controversial" content is always^H^H^H^H sometimes punished by HN (sorry, dang). While I think this is a highly questionable policy which is itself political in nature (reinforcing as it does the status quo), it need not be specific to China.

A statement would certainly be nice, however.

That is false. If you changed "always" to "sometimes" you'd be on the green. I've written about this extensively:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

Some good threads to start with might be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22902490 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21607844. Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17014869, which shows how far back political discussion goes on HN, as well as the argument about politics on HN.

If you (or anyone) takes a look at that material and still has a question that hasn't been answered there, I'd like to know what it is. Please just make sure that you've actually familiarized yourself with the past explanations, though, because the odds are good that they do answer the question.

This explains the flagging. It does not explain the 'duplicate content' article from CNN on the origins of the Tank Man photo, which I believe requires HN moderator activity.

I did notice it the past that HN articles critical of China behaved in a strange way. In the past all the comments in the comment section were downvoted, sometimes you could see dozens of comments greyed out, every single one of them. (Probably because it's not possible to downvote an article). Now the articles are flagged, probably whoever was organising this realised that flagging an article is effectively downvoting it.

Does not much of the "content moderation" on HN get done via HN users flagging posts?

Yeah, and it can take a surprisingly small amount of flags to take down a post. So it could literally just be a dozen people flagging them, not even in a coordinated matter.

Something similar happened on Jan 6 this year with a lot of individual users being like 'No, this isn't related to tech, so we'll flag it." until a couple posts got enough traction to actually stay at the top.

BTW, you can 'anti-flag' by vouching a submission. I've done this a few times when HN insta-flags posts about inclusion in tech.

> Hacker News is a special place

This is not a place.

HN, time for an explanation. This is not trivial.

Having spent the time digging into it, I'd say it turned out to be pretty trivial.

Since these pages will likely be updated, here are the archived links as proof of this happening:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210604192821/https://www.bing....

https://web.archive.org/web/20210604180506/https://images.se...

https://web.archive.org/web/20210604194355/https://www.ecosi...

https://web.archive.org/web/20210604194336/https://search.ao...

Some people probably think "nobody uses Bing", but Bing powers a lot of different search engines (Yahoo, Ecosia, AOL, DuckDuckGo, and more). It's the default search engine on millions of devices (Windows, and even if you change it, Windows search still uses it; Xbox uses it as well.)

Looks like it has now been updated and returns images of various tanks and male athletes, but still no images of what seems most relevant to the phrase - the iconic Tiananmen Square photograph that goes by that name.

This is where it gets distressing.

I'm now seeing tank man, it's image number 27... recently posted news article.

When a page returns "no results," something is obviously being banned or censored... at least we know. If the action is less explicit, we can't really know for sure what's happening. How do you distinguish tank man losing prominence from the millions of people complaining that their posts, sites or whatnot aren't receiving a fair amount of exposure?

I noticed the same thing:

It looks like microsoft caught on and is now returning generic results of "tank" or "man":

https://imgur.com/sGEQRXe

https://imgur.com/DjtXltn

Wow. Yup, the results are being tweaked as we speak, which in-and-of-itself its pretty interesting actually i.e. that the BING keepers manipulate specific results on-the-fly.

I'm not sure that's reassuring/comforting!

Still returns the same (no results) for images, at least for me.

I get tanks, and men in tank tops. Google image search results are all photos of tank man.

It seems like their safe search is hiding even search results for other related search terms. I am not sure how they were moderated to be not safe. https://archive.is/KOTNB

I hope Microsoft has a good write up on how this happened, both on the search term blanket ban and the safe search results thing.

I still get nothing with safe search off

Qwant also shows no results. https://web.archive.org/web/20210605040421/https://www.qwant...

I saw results (none of actual tank man) but I searched again a few times and still see no results found.

Also try searching "journalist in blue" via the default (not image) article search on Bing. It lacks the relevant results found on Google or DuckDuckGo.

In case you're wondering why this is news, there are numerous obvious, worldwide, relevant results:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man

https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/25-years-later-tank-man-st... (Note: Microsoft owns this page!)

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/remembering-the-t...

Even if one of the most famous photographs ever taken wasn't called "tank man", it'd still be pretty weird for there to zero results. Try misspelling "man" or "tank", you'll get many results. "tanke man" says "including results for 'tank man'".

My favorite being : "Tank Man Meme" and you get more or less the expected search.

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Tank+Man+Meme

Or "tank man Tiananmen square" results in results. Still kind of odd, this takes duck duck go with it too.

tank man Beijing returns one result

In case it's not immediately obvious, today, June 4, is the anniversary of the event.

It's quite silly though that image search gives no results while web search gives lots of image results.

Yes,the event... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests

HN looks like "A Quiet Place"

>Note: Microsoft owns this page!

Microsoft does not have a stake in MSNBC anymore.

Wow I didn't realize this, but it appears to be true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSNBC

"Microsoft divested itself of its stakes in the MSNBC channel in 2005 and in msnbc.com in July 2012."

I thought their Edge browser was still promoting links to MSNBC, but looking at Edge now, I see the links are to MSN.com which is a completely different thing and actually a Microsoft news portal.

Interesting the news channel is still called MSNBC though even though Microsoft doesn't have any ownership in it anymore.

Thank you for posting this.

The CCP seems to be quite good at practical censorship. They have a history of this - they know the Great Firewall isn't perfect, and don't seem to make a tremendous effort to plug every single hole or find and lock up everyone trying to circumvent it. They know that controlling what most people see most of the time is good enough. They also know that not making too much clear direct effort against those trying to bypass it denies the anti-censorship movement the energy of having martyrs, cause celebres, etc. It seems to work quite well.

I think they're doing the same thing here. Just take an amount of money that's rather modest in the budget of a major government, throw it at 90% of the biggest companies with a few strings attached, and presto, you effectively control the narratives in the American News Media. Most of the companies involved lapped it right up.

In related corporate censorship, the Top Gun remake altered the physical leather jacket worn by Tom Cruise to remove the flags of Taiwan and Japan.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/top-gun-...

This is the real powerful actual vector.

Hollywood flicks and bad 80s pop/rock were (arguably) a genuinely massive part of the Soviet Union's decline. Those things make culture.

Lol why Japan

They are not really friends since https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War

Basically everyone else in Asia hates their guts due to their conduct in WWII.

It's good enough not because people will stop at that, it's good enough because the Great Firewall is one piece in the overall apparatus that "repression" is. People who go beyond the limit will emit other signals that will be caught: they will use non-chinese censorship-resistant softwares, they will connect to non-chinese ips, they will have a secret life that appears suspect to their friends and family, they will raise controversial topics while at work... much like OpSec, running against this system requires impeccable hygiene that will be caught at some point or another.

The Great Firewall will be enough for most people to not look for trouble, but they need the other means to make sure curious people are kept in check

from https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-bing-raises-con...

"A significant percentage of the Microsoft employees who work on Bing are based in China, including some who work on image-recognition software, according to a former employee."

I'm guessing it is a "hand tuned" search result tweak because just appending "china" returns a few images:

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=tank%20man%20china

(For those who don't see results, this is my screen grab of the above at 18:12 UTC : https://imgur.com/a/3tzPV49)

Also, "Tiananmen Square massacre" still returns some image results:

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Tiananmen+Square+massac...

Therefore, the tweak for "tank man" doesn't seem to make any sense since all the other phrases to get to the same sensitive topic are not suppressed.

It's the 6th result for "tank guy" for me. "china protest man tank" also gets it. "Tiananmen square" doesn't autocomplete on bing either, for "some reason"...

It's surprising and shameful to me that Microsoft would be censoring so brazenly even in US search results. Also embarrassing on a technical level that their censorship is this bad. It's also pretty bad at image search compared to Google (compare Google Images "tank guy" to Bing's).

Companies that sell their soul for money are one thing, but Bing has ~2% market share in China, and for this they are crudely censoring search results worldwide? Madness.

I, for one, am glad that this particular Microsoft censorship is global in nature for all to see.

A lot of people say China's internet censorship doesn't matter because it's mainly/just within their own borders, and anyone in China can and does just use a VPN to get outside. While the latter might be true, it misses the point - China is doing a great job of making self-censorship about a number of their sensitive topics a global phenomenon.

As of right now, "tank man china" gives some results, but not the tank man photo. Looks like it's been scrubbed. Crazy.

Indeed, if you search for “tanpk man” (without quotes) it says “including results for tank man” and has many pictures of tanks and men (but none of tank man...) So, it clearly is associating some images with “tank man”, it just doesn’t show results if your search is for “tank man”

Yes, I'm sure this is done via word-filter.

Historically, China doesn't provide a list of banned terms themselves, and companies have to reverse-engineer the list of prohibited terms. Likely Bing has a list of the most obvious terms, as recommended by their lawyers.

"Tank man china" returns no results as of 19:01 UTC.

Even searching for tank woman or tank cat returns results!

Adding "tiananmen square" to "tank man" does return the photo as the 3rd result: tank man tiananmen square

Also, the misspelled version of Tianenmen that I first used worked as well.

OTOH "tank man tiananmen" is also censored. It's pretty clear that there are some specific queries being mishandled here.

> Microsoft said the issue was "due to an accidental human error and we are actively working to resolve this."

(I did some searching.) This is from a report here:

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/microsoft-bing-raises-c...

Of course, the search result is an MSN link.

"actively working to resolve this." Isn't it just remove the filter and that's it?

"6 4 incident" returns meaningful results on Duck Duck Go and Google, but nothing on Microsoft Bing.

Turning safe search off also returns results more like you'd expect, though a bunch of those images are blanked out even then.

The first one returns no images for me

https://twitter.com/MikaelThalen/status/1400906032176640004

A Microsoft spokesperson tells me that "accidental human error" is to blame for missing images of "tank man" on its Bing search results.

"We are actively working to resolve this."

The incident comes on the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

There's no way it was accidental. It could have been a rogue employee that pushed something globally that was supposed to be limited to China...but the idea that it was an accident on the anniversary sounds like a made up story.

Or it could have been a normal employee that ticked the "censor everywhere" box rather than "censor china"

Of course that makes the assumption that it's known and accepted that Microsoft censor the search "tank man" to some parts of the globe, and the accident is that the censorship applied to a larger than desired scope.

It seems unlikely that you could accidently censor something like this globally without trying to do it for at least one specific target demographic.

It's also plausible that the fault was brought in deliberately by a rogue engineer to raise the subject globally.

But why would it happen today? The term is likely censored year round in China, why would it suddenly go from China to global?

https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-bing-raises-con... refers also to human error and ends with this: "A significant percentage of the Microsoft employees who work on Bing are based in China, including some who work on image-recognition software, according to a former employee.

China is known to require search engines operating in its jurisdiction to censor results, but those restrictions are rarely applied elsewhere."

Do they honestly expect people to believe that?

My theory:

Microsoft’s goal was to hide the tank man images, and only the tank man images, from the other image results.

But an engineer, in an act of defiance, made it so that all results would be hidden, making Microsoft’s agenda stupidly obvious, but making it seem like the engineer did it “on accident”.

Why do you think that theory is more likely than they wanted to censor it in china, but accidentally censored it everywhere?

This is plausibly a filter intended for Chinese IP addresses that was accidentally applied to all searches regardless of geographic location.

Original HN post flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925

Given the outsized effect of flags in comparison to upvotes, I’m of the opinion that Chinese national HN members, and some subset of “no politics evar” crowd is more than enough to flag these to just shy of being dead.

Please keep nationalistic attacks off this forum. You have no idea the sort of pressure that users with minority perspectives because of their national/ethnic backgrounds are under on this majority-Western forum. People have literally been hounded off this site after getting attacked for this. Is that the kind of community you, or any of us, want to be part of? Of course it is not. Therefore, don't include swipes like that in your comments here, and remember that other users are just as human as you are, even if they have different backgrounds than you do.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

I'm a member of “no politics evar” crowd, but I feel like both deliberate digital censorship AND artificial tweaks to search results are valid topics.

I hope this was the result of a rogue actor rather than a corporate decision.

And another related post about the event errantly marked as a dupe, something I believe requires mod/admin ability

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028

Something else that I find curious is that this entry vanished from front page for a while, and now it's stuck at the bottom, even though it has twice the points in half the time compared with post number #5 (at the time of writing).

I don't think we need invoke any conspiracies for that; HN's algorithm is ever mysterious. Yesterday a submission of mine hit the front page in 3 seconds with no upvotes.

That happens once you are flagged or bounced off the front page temporarily. You loose some sort of multiplier and are often placed around spot 15

As discussed extensively in the Bing thread [0] comments, this is because DDG uses Bing’s search index.

Microsoft has acknowledged this is in error...[1] (though the error seems to be that censorship meant to just apply to China is being applied everywhere)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395635

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8v9m/bing-censors-tank-man

The search shows images now, but none of them are related to Tienanmen. They're generic images of tanks.

That seems worse, honestly, since before it was obvious to anyone something was being censored. Was the "error" that the search was completely blank instead of full of faux-result clutter?

A Microsoft spokesperson told Motherboard in an email that "This is due to an accidental human error and we are actively working to resolve this."

------

There is no way this is due to an accidental human error. The lying on this point is infuriating.

Why not. A human was asked to fulfill a request to block the "tank man" search in China and forgot to add the country restriction.

There is no way to know if it is true, but it is definitely possible. This is probably an interface that isn't used incredibly frequently and may not be as polished as one might hope.

Accidentally applied worldwide instead of just China sounds possible (or more possible than "my fingers slipped on the t, a, ... keys")

I didn't know DDG uses Bing's search index. What exactly is their value proposition over Bing then?

It's a search proxy service. You can use a VPN to mask your traffic's origin behind your VPN provider's IP, you can use DDG image search to mask your queries behind DDG.

No profiling.

> DuckDuckGo distinguishes itself from other search engines by not profiling its users and by showing all users the same search results for a given search term.

Also note that DDG doesn’t just rely on Bing.

> DuckDuckGo's results are a compilation of "over 400" sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo

neither did I - not using DDG again. Back to Google :(

I believe DDG does not track you.

> error seems to be that censorship meant to just apply to China is being applied everywhere

That's a succinct way of putting it.

Looks like media outlets are starting to cover the story: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8v9m/bing-censors-tank-man

Also:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-bing-raises-con...

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-bing-censors-china...

Hmmm, DuckDuckGo image search shows some people standing next to tanks but not the tank man photo.

I guess it makes sense since DDG uses bing for their search tech but it's pretty disappointing that you can get uncensored searches or privacy but not both.

I just get "Sorry, no results here." on DDG

Unless you have moderate safe search on, in which case it says that the results were blocked by safe search.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&t=hc&va=u&iar=images&iax=...

For me, ddg shows the image in main search, but not in image search.

Right now, an image search for "tank man" returns the tank man photo a whole bunch of times, but only because news articles about Microsoft banning the term use the photo in their headers.

The problem still hasn't been resolved and it probably won't be any time soon. The CCP influence on Microsoft is clear; they cannot be trusted to run a search engine anymore than Baidu can.

If you search for tank man on DDG, the very first result is the Wikipedia article about said individual and the Tiananmen Square massacre. If they were intentionally trying to censor the search results, why would they only censor images?

I don't think DDG is trying to censor results (nor that the parent post is suggesting that), I think they're inheriting censorship from their upstream sources, which aren't the same for different search types (web, images, news, etc.). Interestingly, it seems that even starting to type the "man" in "tank man" will result in no suggestions at all, even though the web results seem reasonable.

I tried turning safe search off and got some images of Tank Man

So disappointing that a search engine like DuckDuckGo would fall prey to this sort of censorship.

I don't think they did. I searched for Tank Man, and the first result is the wikipedia article, followed by nothing but articles about him and the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The images section seems to be the only one that's acting weird, because if I search for "Tank Man China" it shows a bunch of pictures of him.

Doesn't DDG mostly rely on Bing for its results? So a result that's suspiciously missing from Bing would be likely to also be missing from DDG, unless their indexing and crawling is more comprehensive than I thought.

DDG uses Bing for results I’ve heard? So they’re falling prey to the censorship of their provider.

This confirms that, although not obvious when searching, Duck Duck Go is displaying image results from Bing.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&atb=v228-1&iar=images&iax...

Wow, I didn't know this. Is this well known??

DuckDuckGo has always been open about using the Bing Index https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...

Virtually all alternate search engines are Bing.

DuckDuckGo:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&iar=images&kp=-2

Yahoo:

https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?q=tank+man

Qwant:

https://www.qwant.com/?t=images&q=tank+man

Yahoo and DDG both use Bing results.

Wow! That's a surprise to me! Could it be because they are pulling other engines' results? Or is this purposeful?

duckduckgo and yahoo both use bing as the backend.

I don't speak chinese, but "50 cent party" refers to paid online chinese trolls. I think it is written as 50美分派对 [1]

50美分派对 also finds no results on Bing, but plenty of results on Google.

So it's not just tank man. The word filter is active for all search terms that are blocked in china.

50美分的军队 I think is another way of writing it: it shows only 3 images on bing, which all look like ads for Coca Cola.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

I am not surprised you are not finding useful results, because you are using a bizarre translation. The term used in Chinese is 五毛黨, literally "5 mao party" (1 mao = 10 fen = 10 cents).

美分 means "American fen", so it would only be used to refer to American cents.

派對 is a neologism that sounds like the English word "party" and it is only used in the context of having a social gathering.

If you search 五毛黨 you will find plenty of results.

Personally I think most of what foreigners think are 五毛黨 are actually 小粉紅, which means "little pink". This is the term used to describe young nationalists who take part in internet pile-ons, similar to online "activists" we have in the west. It might be that some of them are paid, but I suspect most of them are just doing it because they enjoy feeling like they are part of an in-group.

> 小粉紅

Would it be fair to say that the English phrase "Angry Youth" (used in the same context) has the same meaning?

五毛 or 5毛 - 5 _mao_ is half a yuan, so the equivalent of 50¢. “Fifty cent” is an Americanized translation.

Edit: the wiki page you linked has it in simplified and traditional characters.

> I think it is written as 50美分派对

If you look closely at the Wikipedia article, you'd see that the text in the infobox is 五毛党 (五 wǔ 5, 毛 máo 0.1 piece, 党 dǎng political group [No relation to Daniel G]).

What you wrote is 50 美分 (měi fēn American cent) 派对 (pài duì fun get-together.)

I get Bing results for both, but the "American cent" ones are all about the rapper.

Searching for 50美分派对 on DDG and Ecosia also doesn't return any image results, but Google has plenty of images from articles using the phrase.

Surely this is some technical error with Chinese content settings leaking to the US search? Pretty big fail, regardless.

This is an obvious one to catch for us, I wonder what other foreign censorship makes it's way into our web.

Microsoft says it was due to an accidental human error.

https://twitter.com/josephfcox/status/1400913178125553665?s=...

Right of course is.

Yet 'another accident' on the anniversary of the crackdowns of the Tiananmen Square protests. /s

Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397695 about degrees of freedom and Von Neumann elephants. I have no knowledge of what's going on at MS, but it is a complex enough system to generate endless datapoints. What makes them significant is that we pick the ones to single out as meaningful. (Edit: by "we" I mean anyone, of course.)

To be clear, I don't care about $BigCo, only HN; and if there's any actual evidence that this whole thing was anything other than randomness playing its usual tricks on the hivemind, that would actually be interesting and on-topic for HN. But note those words "actual" and "evidence".

I’m not sure what you’re trying to imply. The fact that it’s the anniversary would easily explain why they’re making sure it’s censored properly in China, the human error is that it’s being censored outside of China.

Interestingly, they didn't just block the query string, it appears that they purged their image results based on some generalization of tank man. I noticed that "tiennamin square man" doesn't return any pictures of the scene. However, the purge didn't hit the "suggested image" thumbnails.

Yeah, there are two things going on here:

1) Some queries are blocked. This results in "Nothing found", even when there obviously are images...

2) Some images are blocked. If you use a query that bypasses the word-filter, some images are still removed from the result list anyway.

It's very clear that what we're seeing is the Chinese results for Bing, but everywhere in the world...

I like to pretend that the impetus for the stunt came not from a mentality that values civic minded free speech but rather from the CCC couple-whining (and getting its way) to bing about blocking tank man globally "just this once on the anniversary".

This needs to be upvoted to the top so that we get some answers as to why this well-known history is not searchable via such a major tech company’s search functionality. It’s the top result via Google, why is Bing so bad at this?

Google doesn't have a search engine in China, and Bing does have a search engine in China.

Should not Bing have a separate/dedicated search engine in China? Does Bing has to censure US/World results from a well know fact to be allowed to operate in China? Because I have some difficulties to understand why Bing is censuring such fact outside the Great Firewall of China.

That is why Western companies should not be allowed to do business with dictatorships. It is not to sanction the regime. It is to save our own culture of freedom from being destroyed by business requirements enforced onto our companies by these regimes.

To be fair a search of tank man on bing does have results including pictures. For some reason the same imagines that appear on the main search results page don't show up on the image results tab.

I'm in the US searching for it and getting nothing for the image results. Why are the images specifically blocked?

I don't think there's anything fair about this. I don't like the idea of a US company censoring information from me in this way. Because now I'm really curious as to what else is being censored/flagged out.

It's because the search query is blocked.

I think the more surprising thing is that it only effects the Image search results, and not the web search results.

I checked the Video results, and Videos also appear blocked.

It's possible that Image and Video search utilize the same word-filter list, and for some reason web-searches use a different list.

It appears the avatar in the chip (using Material nomenclature here for the UI components) for suggested search result "Tank Man China" has the original image, but clicking on the chip takes you a page missing said image.

This is disgusting. Never held any fantasies about Microsoft, but this example of Chinese censorship taking over the world by means of an American corporation is the new low.

Don't think I will be able to buy any Microsoft product ever again.

Obviously the intention of whoever flagged the original post is to keep this off the front page. I suspect that this post will also be flagged soon.

I archived these for posterity at https://honeypot.net/post/bing-is-censoring-tank-man-search-... because the previous thread got flagged.

There are no image results for Tank Man. Regular search results in pictures and articles.

The point here is that it seems extremely unlikely image search results is the actual result of a sift through the available indexed data. Meaning that some manual mechanism is responsible for the page being blank.

It must be. There is nothing in the words "tank man" that would trigger any sort of filter. My guess is that this was supposed to be limited to Chinese IP's and someone forgot to add that to the config.

I agree, and this probably isn't good; but, I want accuracy in what's being said when it comes to censorship. We shouldn't win against censorship by hyperbole but by the unfiltered reality being so horrible that people wouldn't want it, anyway.

Image results on anything else than tank man, like tanks man or tank man image, does result in various results (muscular men in tanks).

But zero images on these two generic words means it has to be censored. I would at least expect odd pictures of muscular men in tanks like in the other searches

Regular search results for me are just wikipedia articles only, with everything but the top 2 being completely unrelated. How odd

no video results either.

It doesn't really surprise me that bing does this - I'm more disappointed that HN censored the original post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925). Feel like that's totally against our values.

users flag posts in almost all circumstances. too many users flagged it.

HN isn't policed by its admins except in extremely rare cases.

Unknown Protester and Unknown Rebel does show some Bing image results that are relevant.

Lots of results for 'tink man', 'tonk man' and 'tenk man': mainly tanks and men.

Zero results for 'tank man'.

Here's an article about it: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8v9m/bing-censors-tank-man

Makes me wonder what other pitfalls there are to using DDG.

This was my thought as well.

No results on DuckDuckGo, either: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&t=hc&va=u&iax=images&ia=i...

Plenty of results on Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=tank+man&tbm=isch

Google: 1, Bing/DDG: 0

So much for "privacy/simplicity", eh?