Bing filters LGBT searches in Arabic countries

User Rating: / 0
PoorBest 

Microsoft’s Bing search engine has been accused of censoring non-pornographic gay and lesbian searches in Arabic countries.

Technology website The Register reports that testing of the search engine in January found it filtered out English and Arabic words related to homosexuality.

The test was carried out by Open Net Initiative, which said that people using the Arabic version of Bing in Arabic countries saw a pop-up message when they searched for certain words.

The message said: “Your country or region requires a strict Bing SafeSearch setting, which filters out results that might return adult content.”

Researchers said that Arabic words which were filtered in website searches included the terms “gay”, “lesbian” and “homosexuality”.

Presumably, this would prevent users of the Arabic version of Bing from accessing information about gay equality, health and news.

However, the Open Net Initiative found that Bing does not place geographical limits on which version of the search engine people can use.

“Additionally, in the case of Arabic keywords, users can sidestep the search engine censorship regime by adding another non-filtered Arabic keyword to the filtered one.”

Researchers did not find any evidence of Bing blocking Arabic or English terms relating to other censorship issues, such as “democracy”, “equality” or “opposition”.

Microsoft has not commented on the claims.

Article Source Provided by PinkNews.co.uk