Tiananmen Square, June 4, 1989: the iconic image of Wang Weilin, a student who stops the tanks and is then killed along with other demonstrators (Lapresse)
On the anniversary of the protests of Tiananmen Square (June 4, 1989), the iconic image of Wang Weilin, the student who stopped the tanks and was later killed along with other demonstrators who, alone, mysteriously disappeared from Bing.
Typing the query “tank man” on the search engine of Microsoft the answer “there are no results” appeared, which immediately made us think of a censorship: Bing is one of the few foreign search engines licensed in China, where the local government has blocked free access to the Internet with firewalls and more generally is known to block content and ideas unwelcome to the regime.
Not even from abroad the users of Bing they could access the photograph that best of all symbolizes those days of courageous protests. Microsoft he explained that it was due to “a human error, which we are trying to solve”.
Kenneth Roth, Director of Human Rights Watch, commented on this explanation as “a difficult thing to believe”, the fact is that, a few hours later, the image reappeared on Bing.