Microsoft Is Censoring Searches in U.S. for Politically Sensitive Chinese Names

It could be very uncomfortable for microsoft, politically, in the US, if it turns out they are applying Chinese-appeasing policies in the United States, to US users with their locale set to en-US (or even zh-US!). That's what I want to know; if somebody can prove there are blacklists checked into config files, I'd be very interested.

This is a description of the work: https://citizenlab.ca/2022/05/bada-bing-bada-boom-microsoft-...

The work is quite interesting to read (having been on the other side of systems like this) but it uses statistical techniques like fisher tests in a fairly naive way. My next complaint is that they use the term censorship. I prefer to use the term "suppression of legitimately interesting results to further a political or business need".

At some point the paper devolves into speculating abotu the complex serving systems that produce suggestions at runtime (they are a function of thousands of feature variables). Probably the best readers of this paper would the (US-based ) technical lead and product manager for Bing, who should read it in detail and plug all the obvious bugs that were found.