Big Brother is Watching: 66,000 censorship rules control content on search engines in China

New Delhi: A recent report by the Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity research group at the University of Toronto, has revealed more than 66,000 rules of censorship that control the content that is available to people using search engines in China. The most shocking is the inclusion of Microsoft’s Bing in the list that actively abide by these rules. Microsoft is the only foreign search engine that is allowed to operate in China. The report claimed that China’s censorship net has widened over the years and has become more subtle. Search engines operating in China reportedly created algorithms to ‘hard censor’ searches that the government thought were politically sensitive. If someone searched a topic that was politically sensitive, search engines would provide no results or the results would be limited to selected sources, which suited the ruling Communist Party’s agenda. According to T_he New York Times_, Jeffrey Knockel, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab and an author of the report, said, “You might get no results if it is a very sensitive topic, but if your query is subject to this kind of self-censorship, what happens is you actually appear to get results as normal, but that’s not actually happening.” He added, “You’re getting results only from certain pre-authorized websites.” Citizen Lab studied eight online platforms that offered search tools - Baidu, Sogou, Bing, Weibo, Douyin, Bilibili, Baidu Zhidao, and Jingdong. There have been reports that most of these platforms have previously censored content that is viewed by the CCP as a threat, such as topics related to politics, religious or ethnic. But now they have extended those restrictions, such as content related to illegal surrogacy, martyrs, and false information about COVID-19. Each has created a separate and unique mechanism to comply with the government’s restrictions. When the ‘Chinese spy balloon’ incident happened in February this year, Weibo, China’s equivalent to Twitter, restricted search results to only Chinese state sources if anyone wanted to know more about the incident. Similarly, Baidu restricted and redirected results which included China’s President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Microsoft’s Bing has also restricted search results. According to NYT, Caitlin Roulston, a spokeswoman for Microsoft, said, “We are reaching out to Citizens Lab directly to get more information so that we can conduct any further investigation needed.” Bing has previously faced crackdown from the Chinese authorities and in 2019, it was blocked temporarily in the country. With inputs from agencies Read all the Latest News, Trending News, Cricket News, Bollywood News, India News and Entertainment News here. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.