61 ms·

There are no results for tank man

2105 points by rcoveson 5y ago

nairboon 5y ago
It appears that Yandex actually returns the most relevant results for this query.
ironMonkey 5y ago
Been with DDG for 8+ years. Let's just admit, that the privacy respecting search engines have a huge fault — a killswitch that they don't own. DDG isn't investing in their own crawlers so this can happen anytime now. At least Google showed me the picture.
hestefisk 5y ago
It seems they are back up?
npteljes 5y ago
Locality must matter here. I get plenty of relevant results, and also images that complain about the censorship itself.
yesenadam 5y ago
In the early 2000s I got a taxi in Sydney, and the driver, a Muslim, passionately told me that he could not be more certain that Jews were behind the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001. He kept repeating how absolutely certain he was, as if that was meant to be impressive, instead of what it was, unforgettably horrifying. I got a similar feeling today reading the many dozens of comments on this page claiming to be absolutely certain of things they evidently know nothing about. Guesses in the dark pass for knowledge in this strange atmosphere. I felt a strong urge to place bets with these people. 100 to 1 would be attractive, no, if you are 100% certain? I get $1000 if you are wrong, you get $10 if you are right. But I somehow doubt I'd get many takers. It's just been very embarrassing. I've felt embarrassed for HN. Not to mention the many ignorant attacks on dang on here in the last day or so, under stories on this and other conspiracy-related topics, e.g. the "LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator" story. Just shameful. Maybe people flag such stories because their average comment quality is so appallingly low.
OJFord 5y ago
I get it as a video still if I add 'tianenmen'; but that's not necessary with DDG (my usual search engine) which I thought relied on Bing. Also, Bing returns so few images for any query? Seems weird in itself, but also makes it more probably/reasonable not to get a specific image you'd expect for a query if there's only a handful shown..
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Anthony-G 5y ago
I just saw this story reported on the website of the national broadcaster (originally from AFP) and came to Hacker News expecting to find more details on this story. 20 hours after this was originally posted, I see that 15 of the first 17 results (top 3 rows) for the Bing image search are about other sites’ coverage of Microsoft’s censorship. Of these, 8 include the censored photograph. There’s some sort of circular irony there. The results returned by Bing Image search are still very different to those returned by a Google Image search.
1cvmask 5y ago
Do people remember when they portrayed the presidential candidate Michael Dukakis as the tank man? https://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/tank-ride-video https://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/tank-ride-video
sam345 5y ago
Makes you wonder how else politics effects search results either way. Particularly if the search engine company itself is politically motivated. And always plausible deniability.
OkGoDoIt 5y ago
Probably relevant, Bing is not blocked in China the way Google is. capitulation like this on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square might have something to do with that.
rcoveson 5y ago
Original HN post flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925
- iso1631 5y ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028
- xenocratus 5y ago
  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).
  - dTal 5y ago
    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.
    - floatingatoll 5y ago
      For those who've made it this far down into the thread but not yet seen dang's reply, it's further upthread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397230
  - foxhop 5y ago
    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
- falcolas 5y ago
  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.
thehoomanist 5y ago
Why is something connected to tech, and uncovering an important ethical bias and issue, being flagged? With no transparency about the reasons, nonetheless.
- joemi 5y ago
  If you mean flagged on HN, there's great transparency about the reasons: users can flag whatever they want.
  - partiallypro 5y ago
    They should implement a system like Slashdot had in which you'd only get certain abilities if you had enough contribution points. That would prevent random accounts from flagging things when their account is only 5 points, etc. Also, the admins have the ability to remove the flag but haven't, which I find baffling/troubling. Everyone wants part of the Chinese cookie it seems.
sounds 5y ago
In case you're wondering why this is news, there are numerous obvious, worldwide, relevant results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/25-years-later-tank-man-still-a-mystery-272274499704 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-tiananmen-square-crackdown-and-the-tank-man/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/remembering-the-t...
- jp57 5y ago
  In case it's not immediately obvious, today, June 4, is the anniversary of the event.
  - belter 5y ago
    Yes,the event... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests HN looks like "A Quiet Place"
    - jp57 5y ago
      Christ. I wasn't avoiding mentioning it out of fear, I just thought that the three links in the parent would be sufficient for people to resolve the anaphor.
  - bonzini 5y ago
    It's quite silly though that image search gives no results while web search gives lots of image results.
- Brendinooo 5y ago
  >Note: Microsoft owns this page! Microsoft does not have a stake in MSNBC anymore.
  - samspenc 5y ago
    Wow I didn't realize this, but it appears to be true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSNBC 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.
arcticfox 5y ago
Surely this is some technical error with Chinese content settings leaking to the US search? Pretty big fail, regardless.
- Apofis 5y ago
  This is an obvious one to catch for us, I wonder what other foreign censorship makes it's way into our web.
ludamad 5y ago
I have to wonder here. The videos tab continues to show results, is this just leaking the fact that they have a unified image service globally?
- clusterfish 5y ago
  Videos tab shows no results for me
CoolGuySteve 5y ago
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.
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  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.
- kissgyorgy 5y ago
  https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&t=hc&va=u&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&t=hc&va=u&iar=images&iax=...
- ucosty 5y ago
  I just get "Sorry, no results here." on DDG
  - 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
    Unless you have moderate safe search on, in which case it says that the results were blocked by safe search.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  For me, ddg shows the image in main search, but not in image search.
- toxik 5y ago
  So disappointing that a search engine like DuckDuckGo would fall prey to this sort of censorship.
troelsSteegin 5y ago
That returns results via DDG and Google. I am querying from the US. I am suprised to see no results through Bing directly.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  I get zero image results for "tank man" on DDG
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
bmcooley 5y ago
Searching "tiennenman square massacre" pulls up the image as the second result.
- verdverm 5y ago
  searching "tiennenman square" also results in a suggested narrowing search which includes "tank man" at the end
surround 5y ago
DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&iar=images&kp=-2 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&iar=images&kp=-2 Yahoo: https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?q=tank+man https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?q=tank+man Qwant: https://www.qwant.com/?t=images&q=tank+man https://www.qwant.com/?t=images&q=tank+man
- rolobio 5y ago
  Wow! That's a surprise to me! Could it be because they are pulling other engines' results? Or is this purposeful?
  - detaro 5y ago
    duckduckgo and yahoo both use bing as the backend.
- aphextron 5y ago
  Yahoo and DDG both use Bing results.
t-writescode 5y ago
There are no image results for Tank Man. Regular search results in pictures and articles.
- seanalltogether 5y ago
  Regular search results for me are just wikipedia articles only, with everything but the top 2 being completely unrelated. How odd
- castis 5y ago
  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.
  - t-writescode 5y ago
    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.
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    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.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - ccsnags 5y ago
      I got thousands of images back by searching “ dhshsjdjfjfjdj” Censorship is disgusting.
      - 5y ago
wait_a_minute 5y ago
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?
- michaelmrose 5y ago
  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.
  - virtue3 5y ago
    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.
    - jaynetics 5y ago
      Trying this now from Germany, same here. 0 results in the image tab. “Keine Ergebnisse für Tank man gefunden."
    - michaelmrose 5y ago
      If they were actually going to censor results wouldn't they censor the web results as well? What makes you think this isn't a technical issue.
      - virtue3 5y ago
        You've got to be joking. Blanking out image results for a specific search string is a technical issue? This goes a little bit beyond assuming incompetence.
bb88 5y ago
I prefer to read hacker news through the hckrnews.com interface. It doesn't removed flagged content, and tells you what was killed. Censoring articles on censorship by tech companies just ain't kosher.
Kim_Bruning 5y ago
see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028
adamredwoods 5y ago
If you do a Bing search for 'tank man tiananmen' the bubble of suggested searches in the upper row shows the actual image.
MikeDelta 5y ago
Odd, if you search for tanks man, or tank men, or tank man picture, you get all sorts of nonsense (tanks man shows one actual image). But zero results for such generic words means it has to be blocked actively.
- whoopdedo 5y ago
  Or if you add any arbitrary word to the search, e.g. "tank man the"
deanCommie 5y ago
Elsewhere on HackerNews there are discussions about how GDPR regulations affect the internet entirely - not just in the EU. And there are famous examples how California environmental regulations bring up the quality of products US-wide so everyone benefits from safety and consumer protections not just people in california. In both cases, this is because it's easier to just have ONE version of a product if your market subset (EU, California) is big enough to justify it becoming the DEFAULT version of the product. I...am truly terrified this is where we are heading with censorship and Chinese policies and the rest of the free and open web. At what point do companies that have to censor information for their chinese audience decide it's just less of a hassle to have the same censorship apply blanketly world-wide?
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
  This situation is very advantageous for China companies. They can access foreign markets unhindered, but foreign companies can't access their market without cowtowing to the CCP, and not all companies ready for it. Maybe the correct solution would be to symmetrically block China's businesses in US and EU, so they would have to abandon either censorship or export of services
- teddyh 5y ago
  > At what point do companies that have to censor information for [local] audience decide it's just less of a hassle to have the same censorship apply blanketly world-wide? This has already happened. The U.S. has much more strict standards regarding nudity than the rest of the world in general, but the world has largely adopted U.S. norms, and nudity is now censored worldwide. So much for multi-culturalism.
  - azalemeth 5y ago
    Indeed -- at least in English. Continental Europe is a bit more sensible, IMO ;-).
- toss1 5y ago
  That may be what they are doing. And let us be clear - it is bad enough when the major tech companies gladly apply CCP or RUS filtering within those territories. The CCP is the friend of no one but themselves, and they are global expansionists. The RUS govt is an international criminal syndicate masquerading as a govt. If the tech companies start applying those same CCP/RUS standards globally, then the response should be to shut off those countries from the internet.
kstrauser 5y ago
I archived these for posterity at https://honeypot.net/post/bing-is-censoring-tank-man-search-results/ https://honeypot.net/post/bing-is-censoring-tank-man-search-... because the previous thread got flagged.
Dig1t 5y ago
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.
notorandit 5y ago
In case it is not immediately obvious, Bing is not a search engine but an ad engine. Also google is. But hands more ads and results.
kian 5y ago
@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.
- dTal 5y ago
  "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.
  - kian 5y ago
    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.
  - 0-_-0 5y ago
    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.
    - dang 5y ago
jasode 5y ago
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 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 https://imgur.com/a/3tzPV49) Also, "Tiananmen Square massacre" still returns some image results: https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Tiananmen+Square+massacre 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.
- fighterpilot 5y ago
  The first one returns no images for me
- cogs 5y ago
  Even searching for tank woman or tank cat returns results!
- drdeca 5y ago
  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”
- jasonhansel 5y ago
  "Tank man china" returns no results as of 19:01 UTC.
- amilios 5y ago
  As of right now, "tank man china" gives some results, but not the tank man photo. Looks like it's been scrubbed. Crazy.
- ALittleLight 5y ago
  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.
slugiscool99 5y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925). Feel like that's totally against our values.
- Supermancho 5y ago
  Unknown Protester and Unknown Rebel does show some Bing image results that are relevant.
- naikrovek 5y ago
  users flag posts in almost all circumstances. too many users flagged it. HN isn't policed by its admins except in extremely rare cases.
  - KirillPanov 5y ago
    and santa claus exists
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      I actually believe in dang a fair amount more than I believe in Santa Claus.
sthnblllII 5y ago
The Tienamen square protest began because the Communist party as part of its dealings for African mineral rights allowed African students into Chinese universities and those African students were caught sexually assaulting Chinese women. The point of the "pro-democracy" activism was to replace the relatively socially liberal and pro-globalization Communist party with a more nationalist government that would protect the Chinese people and not sacrifice their safety for international power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_anti-African_protests#Tiananmen_Square_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_anti-African_protests#... For obvious reasons, pro-liberal pro-globalisation factions in the West downplay the role of the nationalist anti-globalisation anti-liberal origins of the protests.
- belter 5y ago
  Good evening Beijing, what time is it there now... 2 AM ? Working late for the social credit ?
  - dang 5y ago
    You can't break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is. Perhaps you don't owe the other commenter better, but you most certainly owe this community better if you're posting to it. No more of this, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - r_u_erect 5y ago
      You can’t be serious… nobody “owes” this “community” anything. Bro.
- dang 5y ago
  I have no idea what to make of this, but since your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle and you've ignored our requests to stop, I've banned it. We ban accounts that do that regardless of whatever is they're battling for, because it destroys the intended purpose of this site. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
bob33212 5y ago
Works for me. https://www.bing.com/search?q=tank+man https://www.bing.com/search?q=tank+man
- detaro 5y ago
  ... which is not image search as in the submission.
- jackmoore 5y ago
  Try the 'images' tab.
ufmace 5y ago
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.
- ColinHayhurst 5y ago
  from https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-bing-raises-concerns-over-lack-image-results-tiananmen-tank-man-2021-06-04/ 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."
- rakoo 5y ago
  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
- drak0n1c 5y ago
  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-maverick-trailer-sparks-controversy-tom-cruise-jacket-1225993/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/top-gun-...
narrator 5y ago
Yandex, the english language version of the Russian search engine, does not censor anything. It's by far the best search engine for politically controversial topics. You can even search for Putin stuff and get good results. https://yandex.com/images/search?from=tabbar&text=tank%20man https://yandex.com/images/search?from=tabbar&text=tank%20man
- chalcolithic 5y ago
  This won't last for long.
- ComodoHacker 5y ago
  Russian version surely has its filters.
  - mananaysiempre 5y ago
    Probably, but different ones. This is somewhat reminiscent of the old advice (which I could swear was Schneier’s, but can’t seem to actually find) to layer ciphers developed by mutually hostile countries, seeing as it’s highly unlikely the same actor would know how to break (e.g.) US, Chinese, and Russian crypto simultaneously even if each of those can be broken by their origin country. Although I have to note that I’m not aware of any censorship in Yandex web search, unlike for example Yandex News where pretty blatant examples occur regularly—but Yandex News is pretty irrelevant outside ex-USSR anyway. Except for apparently socially acceptable censorship like that engendered by “right to be forgotten” laws and DMCA, of course.
- cynwoody 5y ago
  The Russian site also appears wide open. Example: https://yandex.ru/video/search?text=navalny%20putin%27s%20palace https://yandex.ru/video/search?text=navalny%20putin%27s%20pa...
jerry1979 5y ago
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.
- ggggtez 5y ago
  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...
  - jerry1979 5y ago
    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".
jasonhansel 5y ago
Looks like media outlets are starting to cover the story: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8v9m/bing-censors-tank-man https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8v9m/bing-censors-tank-man
- jasonhansel 5y ago
  Also: https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-bing-raises-concerns-over-lack-image-results-tiananmen-tank-man-2021-06-04/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-bing-raises-con... https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-bing-censors-china-tiananmen-square-tank-man-image-searches-2021-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-bing-censors-china...
robotresearcher 5y ago
Lots of results for 'tink man', 'tonk man' and 'tenk man': mainly tanks and men. Zero results for 'tank man'.
TheRealDunkirk 5y ago
You'd expect this to AT LEAST return that goofy pick of Dukakis sticking his head out of a tank.
koolba 5y ago
Interestingly if you search for "tankman" (no space) you get some a mix of military tanks and some men wearing tank tops. https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=tankman https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=tankman
hatsunearu 5y ago
More reasons not to use Bing--vote with your wallets.
- lolc 5y ago
  More like vote with your eyeballs.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
a3n 5y ago
> Try less specific keywords. Checks out. https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Vehicle+being&qs=n&form=QBIR&sp=-1&pq=vehicle+being&sc=5-13&sk=&cvid=04A05EFE40C14487A497001F2868B398 https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Vehicle+being&qs=n&form...
j_barbossa 5y ago
Every time I see posts like this or about Taiwan I'm happily upvoting. I'm a big fan of the Streisand effect.
waltwalther 5y ago
There are no results for 'tank man' under images, videos, and maps, but searching Bing under everything shows a thumbnail of the tank man/unknown protester as the first result.
nsxwolf 5y ago
Lots of results for "Tank Girl", thankfully.
ggggtez 5y ago
Yikes. Let's try others... Google: Plenty of results DuckDuckGo: No results Wait, I thought DuckDuckGo said they are the "No Censorship" search engine, or something like that?
- csmiller 5y ago
  I believe DDG uses Bing for their results
- mda 5y ago
  Duckduckgo mostly uses bing index.
- bencollier49 5y ago
  Looks to me like DDG have fixed this now.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Not for me presently. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&ia=images&iax=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&ia=images&iax=images http://web.archive.org/web/20210604211040/https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&ia=images&iax=images http://web.archive.org/web/20210604211040/https://duckduckgo...
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      Self-reply: very barely expected results began showing up an hour or three after posting this.
ggggtez 5y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
- jeroenhd 5y ago
  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.
- lukewrites 5y ago
  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.
- yorwba 5y ago
  > 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.
- alisonatwork 5y ago
  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.
______- 5y ago
https://lite.qwant.com/?q=tank+man https://lite.qwant.com/?q=tank+man
hyperion2010 5y ago
8964 also returning lego kits and trains.
jostmey 5y ago
Same for duckduckgo. duckduckgo is blocking images of tank man during the Tiananmen square massacre
- mediaman 5y ago
  Just checked - you're right! At first I thought it was because safe search was enabled, but disabling it gives the same results (zero). https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&t=h_&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&t=h_&iar=images&iax=image... Their regular web search shows no evident censorship though. Why is this? Does DuckDuckGo rely on a third party for image search that is itself censoring results?
  - detaro 5y ago
    Both are primarily based on Bing, at least for western markets.
fallingfrog 5y ago
Searching on the main page gives all kinds of results, this only happens on the image search. Why censor one and not the other? The alternative explanation is that bing’s image search just sucks. https://www.bing.com/search?q=Tank+man&FORM=HDRSC1 https://www.bing.com/search?q=Tank+man&FORM=HDRSC1
johnfernow 5y ago
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.com/images/search?q=tank+man https://web.archive.org/web/20210604192821/https://www.bing.... https://web.archive.org/web/20210604180506/https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?q=tank+man https://web.archive.org/web/20210604180506/https://images.se... https://web.archive.org/web/20210604194355/https://www.ecosia.org/images?q=tank+man https://web.archive.org/web/20210604194355/https://www.ecosi... https://web.archive.org/web/20210604194336/https://search.aol.com/aol/image?q=tank+man 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.)
- ddlatham 5y ago
  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.
  - mfkp 5y ago
    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/sGEQRXe https://imgur.com/DjtXltn https://imgur.com/DjtXltn
  - karamanolev 5y ago
    Still returns the same (no results) for images, at least for me.
  - dalbasal 5y ago
    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?
duckrandom 5y ago
There are no results for tank man on duckduckgo https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&t=ffnt&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&t=ffnt&iar=images&iax=ima...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ltbarcly3 5y ago
If you follow this link and get 'no image found', and hit reload a few times you do get results. Same if you click to web search and back to images. To me this seems like a bug and not some kind of censorship attempt that only works if you don't hit reload.
_of 5y ago
Qwant also shows no results. https://www.qwant.com/?t=images&q=Tank+man https://www.qwant.com/?t=images&q=Tank+man
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  Hm. Qwant seemed to advertise they do some degree of crawling of their own... Do they actually?
binarymax 5y ago
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=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&atb=v228-1&iar=images&iax...
- binbag 5y ago
  Wow, I didn't know this. Is this well known??
  - cyborgx7 5y ago
    DuckDuckGo has always been open about using the Bing Index https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
  - toper-centage 5y ago
    Virtually all alternate search engines are Bing.
iso1631 5y ago
https://twitter.com/MikaelThalen/status/1400906032176640004 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.
- partiallypro 5y ago
  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.
  - ColinHayhurst 5y ago
    https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-bing-raises-concerns-over-lack-image-results-tiananmen-tank-man-2021-06-04/ 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."
  - iso1631 5y ago
    Or it could have been a normal employee that ticked the "censor everywhere" box rather than "censor china"
    - partiallypro 5y ago
      But why would it happen today? The term is likely censored year round in China, why would it suddenly go from China to global?
      - iso1631 5y ago
AzzieElbab 5y ago
this thread had given bling my first click
throwaway789256 5y ago
But there are results for "tank man" tienanmen: https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=%2b%22tank+man%22+tienanmen&form=RCIR&first=1&tsc=ImageBasicHover https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=%2b%22tank+man%22+tiena...
cheese_van 5y ago
From here: https://twitter.com/MikaelThalen/status/1400906032176640004 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."
afvictory 5y ago
There are also no results for "tank man" in Apple's GIF/#images tool in iMessage. There is a GIF present in Messenger's GIF tool which uses Giphy/Tenor. Edit: The same is true if you search "Tienamen"
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
politician 5y ago
He shows up on Bing Image Search if you search for "Unknown Protester" instead. https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Unknown+Protester+&form=HDRSC3&first=1&tsc=ImageHoverTitle https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Unknown+Protester+&form...
at_a_remove 5y ago
The kinds of mechanisms getting rid of Tank Man are being used just to hide this content here. It's fractal. It requires no complicity by the owners or maintainers of Bing or Hacker News, it just means that there are handles by which you can hide things. Outsourcing moderation at scale inevitably results in the ability of one or more parties to vanish content they do not like.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jarek83 5y ago
So they introduced main branch to replace master branch because they are so humanity-full entity, but they are happy to censor history at the same time?
donatj 5y ago
Searching "Tank Man Tiananmen" only provides marginally better results. I think it's clear there's active censorship here and not just a bug.
- ccsnags 5y ago
  I don’t understand how you could have zero results for any two known words in a search engine.
kerng 5y ago
What's Microsoft's response to this? Seems like they'll have some explaining to do who can insert denylisted terms so easily...
- sremani 5y ago
  It is same as usual, Deny, Delay and talk about Inclusion and diversity and Microsoft's needs to comply with local laws and blame fat fingers by some intern who was to be disciplined. Then their General Counsel Brad Smith will write a blog post how half of America are deplorables and what we need to learn from China.
viktorcode 5y ago
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.
throwaway20875 5y ago
This hall of mirrors is only beginning. This is truly terrifying. The most disgusting aspect is the blatant lying and hypocrisy: https://news.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/topic/defending-democracy-program/ https://news.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/topic/defending-dem...
TinkersW 5y ago
I've noticed wikipedia also seems to have censored the tiananmen square massacre to some degree. If you look it up it is now referred to as the "tiananmen square protests", and contains none of the famous photos you might expect to see such as tank man.
rvz 5y ago
Surprise! /s DDG is using Bing Search results!
tomkat0789 5y ago
Here's an article about it: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8v9m/bing-censors-tank-man https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8v9m/bing-censors-tank-man Makes me wonder what other pitfalls there are to using DDG.
- pmlnr 5y ago
  This was my thought as well.
ipspam 5y ago
The 7th and 9th result are correct.
jpindar 5y ago
Microsoft says it was due to an accidental human error. https://twitter.com/josephfcox/status/1400913178125553665?s=20 https://twitter.com/josephfcox/status/1400913178125553665?s=...
- rvz 5y ago
  Right of course is. Yet 'another accident' on the anniversary of the crackdowns of the Tiananmen Square protests. /s
  - lilyball 5y ago
    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.
    - regnull 5y ago
      That's a perfectly good explanation, apart from the fact that an American company does censorship for Chinese government. If it's "inside China" doesn't make it better.
      - Sebb767 5y ago
        Well, an American company not doing censorship for inside China will not stay inside China very long. I personally dislike this a lot, as well, but I can't blame a company for not taking a fall on what is arguably a political decision.
        jeroenhd 5y ago
        Financially, complying with these censorship laws make sense. Ethically, an American company should not be doing business if it involves censorship like this. Right now, things like LGBT+ rights are (sadly, in my opinion) still political decisions, as are decisions surrounding the ever-violent conflicts in the Middle East. Microsoft seems to err on the side of progressiveness in most of these political statements, proudly proclaiming "pride" on their Twitter page, presumably because it makes financial sense more than anything. Microsoft has no problem with politics if it serves to make them money. The sad state of affairs is that money is more important than ethics for most companies. Microsoft made a political decision and that decision was that it's okay to censor recent history of violence against unarmed protestors. I don't see how you cannot blame them for that decision unless you've fallen victim to Chinese propaganda.
retube 5y ago
That's just the image search. OK maybe a bit weird, but the normal search returns results, including of the famous pic / incident
dwt204 5y ago
OK so just as a goof, I typed in "tank man man tank" and voila a few photos showed up in BING and DDG
GeekyBear 5y ago
China Tank Man worked.
varenc 5y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395635 [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8v9m/bing-censors-tank-man https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8v9m/bing-censors-tank-man
- jakeva 5y ago
  I didn't know DDG uses Bing's search index. What exactly is their value proposition over Bing then?
  - ipnon 5y ago
    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.
  - sdeframond 5y ago
    I believe DDG does not track you.
  - thih9 5y ago
    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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo
    - mda 5y ago
      "doesn't rely on bing" but actually mostly rely on bing, they want to create this illusion to hide this ugly fact.
trempisacent 5y ago
As DDG uses Bing for its image search, I wonder if this is related to a large proportion of the Bing product teams being based in China.
pomian 5y ago
Bravo. Thankyou HN and users for this post. It's a simple check, and search results are definitely tainted somehow, especially selecting results in images. It is a reminder of how frangible history is. What will remain in another 30 years m How much history have we lost?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Grustaf 5y ago
If you search for "Unknown protester" you get a big fact box with Tank Man though. https://www.bing.com/search?q=Unknown+Protester&search=&form=QBLH&sp=-1&pq=unknown+protester&sc=0-17&qs=n&sk=&cvid=12B954D6D9FC4085A0FA037DE8C03FBF https://www.bing.com/search?q=Unknown+Protester&search=&form...
1024core 5y ago
No results on DuckDuckGo, either: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&t=hc&va=u&iax=images&ia=images 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 https://www.google.com/search?q=tank+man&tbm=isch Google: 1, Bing/DDG: 0 So much for "privacy/simplicity", eh?
rllearneratwork 5y ago
Bing does show wiki link first but no image results. Duckduckgo does show wiki link first but no image results. Google shows wiki link and image results. I am in US. Could be just that Bing is still very subpar ...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
samcheng 5y ago
Just curious: are there any Chinese nationals (in China) here in this thread? I want to understand the scope of censorship. What do YOU think?
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  I would also like to know. It's funny, because I feel like a lot of media and news I've consumed paints china as this hellish dystopia, so when I (very occasionally) talk with chinese nationals online I'm kinda underwhelmed by how it's just... a place? I don't know.
  - inciampati 5y ago
    It's definitely just another place. It must be in order for people to lead normal, content lives. Politically, it has very alien features that seem unlivable and dystopian to people from countries with strong support of free speech. I can't fathom the motivation for maintaining this. Because they stifle creativity, the authoritarian features of the dominant political culture in China do not seem to be productive over the long term. In my little scientific domain this is definitely visible. I cannot remember significant new approaches developed in China. Despite many attempts I cannot seem to begin meaningful collaborations with researchers in China. The good scientists appear to run away.
- wubin 5y ago
  HN is blocked in China.
SyzygistSix 5y ago
Fortunately Tiananmen Square Massacre works.
wdbbdw 5y ago
As others have mentioned, Bing now shows some results for 'tank man' with tanks and men but no Tiananmen square photo (DDG had the same image results, btw). 'Tank man China' had no results on Bing
__fst__ 5y ago
Paradoxically, as long as all information regarding the Tiananmen massacre in 1989 is being censored, there are people whose job it is to not forget to forget it. This means they'll have to remember to hide this sensitive information. So in a way, by taking so much effort to hide this information, China (and all countries and companies sucking up to it) are keeping this information alive. And (hopefully) eventually, these people will ask themself why it is necessary to hide it.
obelos 5y ago
Someone used Bing?
enw 5y ago
There are now results but none about Tiananmen Massacre
zanethomas 5y ago
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=tank+man&atb=v126-1&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=tank+man&atb=v126-1&iax=ima...
fallingfrog 5y ago
Anytime China shows up on hacker news I get the distinct impression that two well funded troll farms are slugging it out, downvoting and flagging the enemy and upvoting their own side. It’s like watching 2 AIs playing civilization with each other, mindlessly sending forth wave after wave of clubmen in an endless war of attrition that goes nowhere. Poor saps who try to express a nuanced view get attacked by both sides. But we know that the Chinese government does this, and we know that certain organizations like turning point USA do this, although of course I don’t know if either of those groups are active on HN. But it’s the impression I get.
rosmax_1337 5y ago
If Bing can censor this, what else do they censor?
grouphugs 5y ago
i don't get the significance of this, no idea what's going on
worik 5y ago
As I look (01:18 4-June-2021 GMT) at https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=tank+man&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=tank+man&iax=images&ia=images it is the tenth result
alephnan 5y ago
Maybe it's less ironic since Microsoft's company values doesn't include "don't be evil".
jds375 5y ago
About 9 hours ago when I first saw this I noticed the same thing on bing images (no tank man). Now I see tank man when I search it on bing images....
crowf 5y ago
I clicked on the link and I see images. Although, the subtext is mostly about how Bing is censoring it. I wonder what happened.
procinct 5y ago
Interesting, I’m getting results. Pretty much the exact results I would expect as well. Have they fixed it or is this a regional thing?
lota-putty 5y ago
Those pictures are proof how trained military men behave, "maintain a single file". "Tank Man" becomes a legend for brazenly holding the line marching Tanks. Given this scenario to any Indian driver, they'll just pass by using other lanes.

2105 points by rcoveson 5y ago

It appears that Yandex actually returns the most relevant results for this query.

Been with DDG for 8+ years. Let's just admit, that the privacy respecting search engines have a huge fault — a killswitch that they don't own. DDG isn't investing in their own crawlers so this can happen anytime now. At least Google showed me the picture.

hestefisk 5y ago

It seems they are back up?

npteljes 5y ago

Locality must matter here. I get plenty of relevant results, and also images that complain about the censorship itself.

yesenadam 5y ago

In the early 2000s I got a taxi in Sydney, and the driver, a Muslim, passionately told me that he could not be more certain that Jews were behind the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001. He kept repeating how absolutely certain he was, as if that was meant to be impressive, instead of what it was, unforgettably horrifying. I got a similar feeling today reading the many dozens of comments on this page claiming to be absolutely certain of things they evidently know nothing about. Guesses in the dark pass for knowledge in this strange atmosphere. I felt a strong urge to place bets with these people. 100 to 1 would be attractive, no, if you are 100% certain? I get $1000 if you are wrong, you get $10 if you are right. But I somehow doubt I'd get many takers. It's just been very embarrassing. I've felt embarrassed for HN. Not to mention the many ignorant attacks on dang on here in the last day or so, under stories on this and other conspiracy-related topics, e.g. the "LOL just got kicked out of @ycombinator" story. Just shameful. Maybe people flag such stories because their average comment quality is so appallingly low.

OJFord 5y ago

I get it as a video still if I add 'tianenmen'; but that's not necessary with DDG (my usual search engine) which I thought relied on Bing. Also, Bing returns so few images for any query? Seems weird in itself, but also makes it more probably/reasonable not to get a specific image you'd expect for a query if there's only a handful shown..

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Anthony-G 5y ago

I just saw this story reported on the website of the national broadcaster (originally from AFP) and came to Hacker News expecting to find more details on this story. 20 hours after this was originally posted, I see that 15 of the first 17 results (top 3 rows) for the Bing image search are about other sites’ coverage of Microsoft’s censorship. Of these, 8 include the censored photograph. There’s some sort of circular irony there. The results returned by Bing Image search are still very different to those returned by a Google Image search.

1cvmask 5y ago

Do people remember when they portrayed the presidential candidate Michael Dukakis as the tank man? https://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/tank-ride-video https://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/tank-ride-video

sam345 5y ago

Makes you wonder how else politics effects search results either way. Particularly if the search engine company itself is politically motivated. And always plausible deniability.

OkGoDoIt 5y ago

Probably relevant, Bing is not blocked in China the way Google is. capitulation like this on the anniversary of Tiananmen Square might have something to do with that.

rcoveson 5y ago

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

iso1631 5y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028
xenocratus 5y ago
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).
- dTal 5y ago
  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.
  - floatingatoll 5y ago
    For those who've made it this far down into the thread but not yet seen dang's reply, it's further upthread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397230
- foxhop 5y ago
  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
falcolas 5y ago
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.

thehoomanist 5y ago

Why is something connected to tech, and uncovering an important ethical bias and issue, being flagged? With no transparency about the reasons, nonetheless.

joemi 5y ago
If you mean flagged on HN, there's great transparency about the reasons: users can flag whatever they want.
- partiallypro 5y ago
  They should implement a system like Slashdot had in which you'd only get certain abilities if you had enough contribution points. That would prevent random accounts from flagging things when their account is only 5 points, etc. Also, the admins have the ability to remove the flag but haven't, which I find baffling/troubling. Everyone wants part of the Chinese cookie it seems.

sounds 5y ago

In case you're wondering why this is news, there are numerous obvious, worldwide, relevant results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/watch/25-years-later-tank-man-still-a-mystery-272274499704 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-tiananmen-square-crackdown-and-the-tank-man/ https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/remembering-the-t...

jp57 5y ago
In case it's not immediately obvious, today, June 4, is the anniversary of the event.
- belter 5y ago
  Yes,the event... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests HN looks like "A Quiet Place"
  - jp57 5y ago
    Christ. I wasn't avoiding mentioning it out of fear, I just thought that the three links in the parent would be sufficient for people to resolve the anaphor.
- bonzini 5y ago
  It's quite silly though that image search gives no results while web search gives lots of image results.
Brendinooo 5y ago
>Note: Microsoft owns this page! Microsoft does not have a stake in MSNBC anymore.
- samspenc 5y ago
  Wow I didn't realize this, but it appears to be true: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSNBC 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.

arcticfox 5y ago

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

Apofis 5y ago
This is an obvious one to catch for us, I wonder what other foreign censorship makes it's way into our web.

ludamad 5y ago

I have to wonder here. The videos tab continues to show results, is this just leaking the fact that they have a unified image service globally?

clusterfish 5y ago
Videos tab shows no results for me

CoolGuySteve 5y ago

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.

jeroenhd 5y ago
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.
kissgyorgy 5y ago
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&t=hc&va=u&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&t=hc&va=u&iar=images&iax=...
ucosty 5y ago
I just get "Sorry, no results here." on DDG
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 5y ago
  Unless you have moderate safe search on, in which case it says that the results were blocked by safe search.
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
For me, ddg shows the image in main search, but not in image search.
toxik 5y ago
So disappointing that a search engine like DuckDuckGo would fall prey to this sort of censorship.

troelsSteegin 5y ago

That returns results via DDG and Google. I am querying from the US. I am suprised to see no results through Bing directly.

aidenn0 5y ago
I get zero image results for "tank man" on DDG

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

bmcooley 5y ago

Searching "tiennenman square massacre" pulls up the image as the second result.

verdverm 5y ago
searching "tiennenman square" also results in a suggested narrowing search which includes "tank man" at the end

surround 5y ago

DuckDuckGo: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&iar=images&kp=-2 https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&iar=images&kp=-2 Yahoo: https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?q=tank+man https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?q=tank+man Qwant: https://www.qwant.com/?t=images&q=tank+man https://www.qwant.com/?t=images&q=tank+man

rolobio 5y ago
Wow! That's a surprise to me! Could it be because they are pulling other engines' results? Or is this purposeful?
- detaro 5y ago
  duckduckgo and yahoo both use bing as the backend.
aphextron 5y ago
Yahoo and DDG both use Bing results.

t-writescode 5y ago

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

seanalltogether 5y ago
Regular search results for me are just wikipedia articles only, with everything but the top 2 being completely unrelated. How odd
castis 5y ago
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.
- t-writescode 5y ago
  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.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  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.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ccsnags 5y ago
    I got thousands of images back by searching “ dhshsjdjfjfjdj” Censorship is disgusting.
    - 5y ago

wait_a_minute 5y ago

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?

michaelmrose 5y ago
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.
- virtue3 5y ago
  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.
  - jaynetics 5y ago
    Trying this now from Germany, same here. 0 results in the image tab. “Keine Ergebnisse für Tank man gefunden."
  - michaelmrose 5y ago
    If they were actually going to censor results wouldn't they censor the web results as well? What makes you think this isn't a technical issue.
    - virtue3 5y ago
      You've got to be joking. Blanking out image results for a specific search string is a technical issue? This goes a little bit beyond assuming incompetence.

bb88 5y ago

I prefer to read hacker news through the hckrnews.com interface. It doesn't removed flagged content, and tells you what was killed. Censoring articles on censorship by tech companies just ain't kosher.

Kim_Bruning 5y ago

see also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028

adamredwoods 5y ago

If you do a Bing search for 'tank man tiananmen' the bubble of suggested searches in the upper row shows the actual image.

MikeDelta 5y ago

Odd, if you search for tanks man, or tank men, or tank man picture, you get all sorts of nonsense (tanks man shows one actual image). But zero results for such generic words means it has to be blocked actively.

whoopdedo 5y ago
Or if you add any arbitrary word to the search, e.g. "tank man the"

deanCommie 5y ago

Elsewhere on HackerNews there are discussions about how GDPR regulations affect the internet entirely - not just in the EU. And there are famous examples how California environmental regulations bring up the quality of products US-wide so everyone benefits from safety and consumer protections not just people in california. In both cases, this is because it's easier to just have ONE version of a product if your market subset (EU, California) is big enough to justify it becoming the DEFAULT version of the product. I...am truly terrified this is where we are heading with censorship and Chinese policies and the rest of the free and open web. At what point do companies that have to censor information for their chinese audience decide it's just less of a hassle to have the same censorship apply blanketly world-wide?

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
This situation is very advantageous for China companies. They can access foreign markets unhindered, but foreign companies can't access their market without cowtowing to the CCP, and not all companies ready for it. Maybe the correct solution would be to symmetrically block China's businesses in US and EU, so they would have to abandon either censorship or export of services
teddyh 5y ago
> At what point do companies that have to censor information for [local] audience decide it's just less of a hassle to have the same censorship apply blanketly world-wide? This has already happened. The U.S. has much more strict standards regarding nudity than the rest of the world in general, but the world has largely adopted U.S. norms, and nudity is now censored worldwide. So much for multi-culturalism.
- azalemeth 5y ago
  Indeed -- at least in English. Continental Europe is a bit more sensible, IMO ;-).
toss1 5y ago
That may be what they are doing. And let us be clear - it is bad enough when the major tech companies gladly apply CCP or RUS filtering within those territories. The CCP is the friend of no one but themselves, and they are global expansionists. The RUS govt is an international criminal syndicate masquerading as a govt. If the tech companies start applying those same CCP/RUS standards globally, then the response should be to shut off those countries from the internet.

kstrauser 5y ago

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

Dig1t 5y ago

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.

notorandit 5y ago

In case it is not immediately obvious, Bing is not a search engine but an ad engine. Also google is. But hands more ads and results.

kian 5y ago

@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.

dTal 5y ago
"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.
- kian 5y ago
  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.
- 0-_-0 5y ago
  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.
  - dang 5y ago

jasode 5y ago

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 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 https://imgur.com/a/3tzPV49) Also, "Tiananmen Square massacre" still returns some image results: https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Tiananmen+Square+massacre 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.

fighterpilot 5y ago
The first one returns no images for me
cogs 5y ago
Even searching for tank woman or tank cat returns results!
drdeca 5y ago
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”
jasonhansel 5y ago
"Tank man china" returns no results as of 19:01 UTC.
amilios 5y ago
As of right now, "tank man china" gives some results, but not the tank man photo. Looks like it's been scrubbed. Crazy.
ALittleLight 5y ago
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.

slugiscool99 5y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925). Feel like that's totally against our values.

Supermancho 5y ago
Unknown Protester and Unknown Rebel does show some Bing image results that are relevant.
naikrovek 5y ago
users flag posts in almost all circumstances. too many users flagged it. HN isn't policed by its admins except in extremely rare cases.
- KirillPanov 5y ago
  and santa claus exists
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    I actually believe in dang a fair amount more than I believe in Santa Claus.

sthnblllII 5y ago

The Tienamen square protest began because the Communist party as part of its dealings for African mineral rights allowed African students into Chinese universities and those African students were caught sexually assaulting Chinese women. The point of the "pro-democracy" activism was to replace the relatively socially liberal and pro-globalization Communist party with a more nationalist government that would protect the Chinese people and not sacrifice their safety for international power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_anti-African_protests#Tiananmen_Square_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_anti-African_protests#... For obvious reasons, pro-liberal pro-globalisation factions in the West downplay the role of the nationalist anti-globalisation anti-liberal origins of the protests.

belter 5y ago
Good evening Beijing, what time is it there now... 2 AM ? Working late for the social credit ?
- dang 5y ago
  You can't break the site guidelines like this, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is. Perhaps you don't owe the other commenter better, but you most certainly owe this community better if you're posting to it. No more of this, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - r_u_erect 5y ago
    You can’t be serious… nobody “owes” this “community” anything. Bro.
dang 5y ago
I have no idea what to make of this, but since your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle and you've ignored our requests to stop, I've banned it. We ban accounts that do that regardless of whatever is they're battling for, because it destroys the intended purpose of this site. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

bob33212 5y ago

Works for me. https://www.bing.com/search?q=tank+man https://www.bing.com/search?q=tank+man

detaro 5y ago
... which is not image search as in the submission.
jackmoore 5y ago
Try the 'images' tab.

ufmace 5y ago

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.

ColinHayhurst 5y ago
from https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-bing-raises-concerns-over-lack-image-results-tiananmen-tank-man-2021-06-04/ 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."
rakoo 5y ago
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
drak0n1c 5y ago
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-maverick-trailer-sparks-controversy-tom-cruise-jacket-1225993/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/top-gun-...

narrator 5y ago

Yandex, the english language version of the Russian search engine, does not censor anything. It's by far the best search engine for politically controversial topics. You can even search for Putin stuff and get good results. https://yandex.com/images/search?from=tabbar&text=tank%20man https://yandex.com/images/search?from=tabbar&text=tank%20man

chalcolithic 5y ago
This won't last for long.
ComodoHacker 5y ago
Russian version surely has its filters.
- mananaysiempre 5y ago
  Probably, but different ones. This is somewhat reminiscent of the old advice (which I could swear was Schneier’s, but can’t seem to actually find) to layer ciphers developed by mutually hostile countries, seeing as it’s highly unlikely the same actor would know how to break (e.g.) US, Chinese, and Russian crypto simultaneously even if each of those can be broken by their origin country. Although I have to note that I’m not aware of any censorship in Yandex web search, unlike for example Yandex News where pretty blatant examples occur regularly—but Yandex News is pretty irrelevant outside ex-USSR anyway. Except for apparently socially acceptable censorship like that engendered by “right to be forgotten” laws and DMCA, of course.
cynwoody 5y ago
The Russian site also appears wide open. Example: https://yandex.ru/video/search?text=navalny%20putin%27s%20palace https://yandex.ru/video/search?text=navalny%20putin%27s%20pa...

jerry1979 5y ago

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.

ggggtez 5y ago
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...
- jerry1979 5y ago
  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".

jasonhansel 5y ago

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

jasonhansel 5y ago
Also: https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-bing-raises-concerns-over-lack-image-results-tiananmen-tank-man-2021-06-04/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-bing-raises-con... https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-bing-censors-china-tiananmen-square-tank-man-image-searches-2021-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-bing-censors-china...

robotresearcher 5y ago

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

TheRealDunkirk 5y ago

You'd expect this to AT LEAST return that goofy pick of Dukakis sticking his head out of a tank.

koolba 5y ago

Interestingly if you search for "tankman" (no space) you get some a mix of military tanks and some men wearing tank tops. https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=tankman https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=tankman

hatsunearu 5y ago

More reasons not to use Bing--vote with your wallets.

lolc 5y ago
More like vote with your eyeballs.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

a3n 5y ago

> Try less specific keywords. Checks out. https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Vehicle+being&qs=n&form=QBIR&sp=-1&pq=vehicle+being&sc=5-13&sk=&cvid=04A05EFE40C14487A497001F2868B398 https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Vehicle+being&qs=n&form...

j_barbossa 5y ago

Every time I see posts like this or about Taiwan I'm happily upvoting. I'm a big fan of the Streisand effect.

waltwalther 5y ago

There are no results for 'tank man' under images, videos, and maps, but searching Bing under everything shows a thumbnail of the tank man/unknown protester as the first result.

nsxwolf 5y ago

Lots of results for "Tank Girl", thankfully.

ggggtez 5y ago

Yikes. Let's try others... Google: Plenty of results DuckDuckGo: No results Wait, I thought DuckDuckGo said they are the "No Censorship" search engine, or something like that?

csmiller 5y ago
I believe DDG uses Bing for their results
mda 5y ago
Duckduckgo mostly uses bing index.
bencollier49 5y ago
Looks to me like DDG have fixed this now.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Not for me presently. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&ia=images&iax=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&ia=images&iax=images http://web.archive.org/web/20210604211040/https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&ia=images&iax=images http://web.archive.org/web/20210604211040/https://duckduckgo...
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Self-reply: very barely expected results began showing up an hour or three after posting this.

ggggtez 5y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

jeroenhd 5y ago
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.
lukewrites 5y ago
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.
yorwba 5y ago
> 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.
alisonatwork 5y ago
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.

______- 5y ago

https://lite.qwant.com/?q=tank+man https://lite.qwant.com/?q=tank+man

hyperion2010 5y ago

8964 also returning lego kits and trains.

jostmey 5y ago

Same for duckduckgo. duckduckgo is blocking images of tank man during the Tiananmen square massacre

mediaman 5y ago
Just checked - you're right! At first I thought it was because safe search was enabled, but disabling it gives the same results (zero). https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&t=h_&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&t=h_&iar=images&iax=image... Their regular web search shows no evident censorship though. Why is this? Does DuckDuckGo rely on a third party for image search that is itself censoring results?
- detaro 5y ago
  Both are primarily based on Bing, at least for western markets.

fallingfrog 5y ago

Searching on the main page gives all kinds of results, this only happens on the image search. Why censor one and not the other? The alternative explanation is that bing’s image search just sucks. https://www.bing.com/search?q=Tank+man&FORM=HDRSC1 https://www.bing.com/search?q=Tank+man&FORM=HDRSC1

johnfernow 5y ago

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.com/images/search?q=tank+man https://web.archive.org/web/20210604192821/https://www.bing.... https://web.archive.org/web/20210604180506/https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images?q=tank+man https://web.archive.org/web/20210604180506/https://images.se... https://web.archive.org/web/20210604194355/https://www.ecosia.org/images?q=tank+man https://web.archive.org/web/20210604194355/https://www.ecosi... https://web.archive.org/web/20210604194336/https://search.aol.com/aol/image?q=tank+man 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.)

ddlatham 5y ago
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.
- mfkp 5y ago
  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/sGEQRXe https://imgur.com/DjtXltn https://imgur.com/DjtXltn
- karamanolev 5y ago
  Still returns the same (no results) for images, at least for me.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  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?

duckrandom 5y ago

There are no results for tank man on duckduckgo https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&t=ffnt&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&t=ffnt&iar=images&iax=ima...

deleted 5y ago

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ltbarcly3 5y ago

If you follow this link and get 'no image found', and hit reload a few times you do get results. Same if you click to web search and back to images. To me this seems like a bug and not some kind of censorship attempt that only works if you don't hit reload.

_of 5y ago

Qwant also shows no results. https://www.qwant.com/?t=images&q=Tank+man https://www.qwant.com/?t=images&q=Tank+man

mananaysiempre 5y ago
Hm. Qwant seemed to advertise they do some degree of crawling of their own... Do they actually?

binarymax 5y ago

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

binbag 5y ago
Wow, I didn't know this. Is this well known??
- cyborgx7 5y ago
  DuckDuckGo has always been open about using the Bing Index https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/ https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/so...
- toper-centage 5y ago
  Virtually all alternate search engines are Bing.

iso1631 5y ago

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

partiallypro 5y ago
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.
- ColinHayhurst 5y ago
  https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-bing-raises-concerns-over-lack-image-results-tiananmen-tank-man-2021-06-04/ 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."
- iso1631 5y ago
  Or it could have been a normal employee that ticked the "censor everywhere" box rather than "censor china"
  - partiallypro 5y ago
    But why would it happen today? The term is likely censored year round in China, why would it suddenly go from China to global?
    - iso1631 5y ago

AzzieElbab 5y ago

this thread had given bling my first click

throwaway789256 5y ago

But there are results for "tank man" tienanmen: https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=%2b%22tank+man%22+tienanmen&form=RCIR&first=1&tsc=ImageBasicHover https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=%2b%22tank+man%22+tiena...

cheese_van 5y ago

From here: https://twitter.com/MikaelThalen/status/1400906032176640004 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."

afvictory 5y ago

There are also no results for "tank man" in Apple's GIF/#images tool in iMessage. There is a GIF present in Messenger's GIF tool which uses Giphy/Tenor. Edit: The same is true if you search "Tienamen"

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politician 5y ago

He shows up on Bing Image Search if you search for "Unknown Protester" instead. https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Unknown+Protester+&form=HDRSC3&first=1&tsc=ImageHoverTitle https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=Unknown+Protester+&form...

at_a_remove 5y ago

The kinds of mechanisms getting rid of Tank Man are being used just to hide this content here. It's fractal. It requires no complicity by the owners or maintainers of Bing or Hacker News, it just means that there are handles by which you can hide things. Outsourcing moderation at scale inevitably results in the ability of one or more parties to vanish content they do not like.

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jarek83 5y ago

So they introduced main branch to replace master branch because they are so humanity-full entity, but they are happy to censor history at the same time?

donatj 5y ago

Searching "Tank Man Tiananmen" only provides marginally better results. I think it's clear there's active censorship here and not just a bug.

ccsnags 5y ago
I don’t understand how you could have zero results for any two known words in a search engine.

kerng 5y ago

What's Microsoft's response to this? Seems like they'll have some explaining to do who can insert denylisted terms so easily...

sremani 5y ago
It is same as usual, Deny, Delay and talk about Inclusion and diversity and Microsoft's needs to comply with local laws and blame fat fingers by some intern who was to be disciplined. Then their General Counsel Brad Smith will write a blog post how half of America are deplorables and what we need to learn from China.

viktorcode 5y ago

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.

throwaway20875 5y ago

This hall of mirrors is only beginning. This is truly terrifying. The most disgusting aspect is the blatant lying and hypocrisy: https://news.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/topic/defending-democracy-program/ https://news.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/topic/defending-dem...

TinkersW 5y ago

I've noticed wikipedia also seems to have censored the tiananmen square massacre to some degree. If you look it up it is now referred to as the "tiananmen square protests", and contains none of the famous photos you might expect to see such as tank man.

rvz 5y ago

Surprise! /s DDG is using Bing Search results!

tomkat0789 5y ago

Here's an article about it: https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8v9m/bing-censors-tank-man https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8v9m/bing-censors-tank-man Makes me wonder what other pitfalls there are to using DDG.

pmlnr 5y ago
This was my thought as well.

ipspam 5y ago

The 7th and 9th result are correct.

jpindar 5y ago

Microsoft says it was due to an accidental human error. https://twitter.com/josephfcox/status/1400913178125553665?s=20 https://twitter.com/josephfcox/status/1400913178125553665?s=...

rvz 5y ago
Right of course is. Yet 'another accident' on the anniversary of the crackdowns of the Tiananmen Square protests. /s
- lilyball 5y ago
  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.
  - regnull 5y ago
    That's a perfectly good explanation, apart from the fact that an American company does censorship for Chinese government. If it's "inside China" doesn't make it better.
    - Sebb767 5y ago
      Well, an American company not doing censorship for inside China will not stay inside China very long. I personally dislike this a lot, as well, but I can't blame a company for not taking a fall on what is arguably a political decision.
      - jeroenhd 5y ago
        Financially, complying with these censorship laws make sense. Ethically, an American company should not be doing business if it involves censorship like this. Right now, things like LGBT+ rights are (sadly, in my opinion) still political decisions, as are decisions surrounding the ever-violent conflicts in the Middle East. Microsoft seems to err on the side of progressiveness in most of these political statements, proudly proclaiming "pride" on their Twitter page, presumably because it makes financial sense more than anything. Microsoft has no problem with politics if it serves to make them money. The sad state of affairs is that money is more important than ethics for most companies. Microsoft made a political decision and that decision was that it's okay to censor recent history of violence against unarmed protestors. I don't see how you cannot blame them for that decision unless you've fallen victim to Chinese propaganda.

retube 5y ago

That's just the image search. OK maybe a bit weird, but the normal search returns results, including of the famous pic / incident

dwt204 5y ago

OK so just as a goof, I typed in "tank man man tank" and voila a few photos showed up in BING and DDG

GeekyBear 5y ago

China Tank Man worked.

varenc 5y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395635 [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8v9m/bing-censors-tank-man https://www.vice.com/en/article/qj8v9m/bing-censors-tank-man

jakeva 5y ago
I didn't know DDG uses Bing's search index. What exactly is their value proposition over Bing then?
- ipnon 5y ago
  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.
- sdeframond 5y ago
  I believe DDG does not track you.
- thih9 5y ago
  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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DuckDuckGo
  - mda 5y ago
    "doesn't rely on bing" but actually mostly rely on bing, they want to create this illusion to hide this ugly fact.

trempisacent 5y ago

As DDG uses Bing for its image search, I wonder if this is related to a large proportion of the Bing product teams being based in China.

pomian 5y ago

Bravo. Thankyou HN and users for this post. It's a simple check, and search results are definitely tainted somehow, especially selecting results in images. It is a reminder of how frangible history is. What will remain in another 30 years m How much history have we lost?

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Grustaf 5y ago

If you search for "Unknown protester" you get a big fact box with Tank Man though. https://www.bing.com/search?q=Unknown+Protester&search=&form=QBLH&sp=-1&pq=unknown+protester&sc=0-17&qs=n&sk=&cvid=12B954D6D9FC4085A0FA037DE8C03FBF https://www.bing.com/search?q=Unknown+Protester&search=&form...

1024core 5y ago

No results on DuckDuckGo, either: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tank+man&t=hc&va=u&iax=images&ia=images 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 https://www.google.com/search?q=tank+man&tbm=isch Google: 1, Bing/DDG: 0 So much for "privacy/simplicity", eh?

rllearneratwork 5y ago

Bing does show wiki link first but no image results. Duckduckgo does show wiki link first but no image results. Google shows wiki link and image results. I am in US. Could be just that Bing is still very subpar ...

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samcheng 5y ago

Just curious: are there any Chinese nationals (in China) here in this thread? I want to understand the scope of censorship. What do YOU think?

TchoBeer 5y ago
I would also like to know. It's funny, because I feel like a lot of media and news I've consumed paints china as this hellish dystopia, so when I (very occasionally) talk with chinese nationals online I'm kinda underwhelmed by how it's just... a place? I don't know.
- inciampati 5y ago
  It's definitely just another place. It must be in order for people to lead normal, content lives. Politically, it has very alien features that seem unlivable and dystopian to people from countries with strong support of free speech. I can't fathom the motivation for maintaining this. Because they stifle creativity, the authoritarian features of the dominant political culture in China do not seem to be productive over the long term. In my little scientific domain this is definitely visible. I cannot remember significant new approaches developed in China. Despite many attempts I cannot seem to begin meaningful collaborations with researchers in China. The good scientists appear to run away.
wubin 5y ago
HN is blocked in China.

SyzygistSix 5y ago

Fortunately Tiananmen Square Massacre works.

wdbbdw 5y ago

As others have mentioned, Bing now shows some results for 'tank man' with tanks and men but no Tiananmen square photo (DDG had the same image results, btw). 'Tank man China' had no results on Bing

__fst__ 5y ago

Paradoxically, as long as all information regarding the Tiananmen massacre in 1989 is being censored, there are people whose job it is to not forget to forget it. This means they'll have to remember to hide this sensitive information. So in a way, by taking so much effort to hide this information, China (and all countries and companies sucking up to it) are keeping this information alive. And (hopefully) eventually, these people will ask themself why it is necessary to hide it.

obelos 5y ago

Someone used Bing?

enw 5y ago

There are now results but none about Tiananmen Massacre

zanethomas 5y ago

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=tank+man&atb=v126-1&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=tank+man&atb=v126-1&iax=ima...

fallingfrog 5y ago

Anytime China shows up on hacker news I get the distinct impression that two well funded troll farms are slugging it out, downvoting and flagging the enemy and upvoting their own side. It’s like watching 2 AIs playing civilization with each other, mindlessly sending forth wave after wave of clubmen in an endless war of attrition that goes nowhere. Poor saps who try to express a nuanced view get attacked by both sides. But we know that the Chinese government does this, and we know that certain organizations like turning point USA do this, although of course I don’t know if either of those groups are active on HN. But it’s the impression I get.

rosmax_1337 5y ago

If Bing can censor this, what else do they censor?

grouphugs 5y ago

i don't get the significance of this, no idea what's going on

worik 5y ago

As I look (01:18 4-June-2021 GMT) at https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=tank+man&iax=images&ia=images https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=tank+man&iax=images&ia=images it is the tenth result

alephnan 5y ago

Maybe it's less ironic since Microsoft's company values doesn't include "don't be evil".

jds375 5y ago

About 9 hours ago when I first saw this I noticed the same thing on bing images (no tank man). Now I see tank man when I search it on bing images....

crowf 5y ago

I clicked on the link and I see images. Although, the subtext is mostly about how Bing is censoring it. I wonder what happened.

procinct 5y ago

Interesting, I’m getting results. Pretty much the exact results I would expect as well. Have they fixed it or is this a regional thing?

lota-putty 5y ago

Those pictures are proof how trained military men behave, "maintain a single file". "Tank Man" becomes a legend for brazenly holding the line marching Tanks. Given this scenario to any Indian driver, they'll just pass by using other lanes.