The Open Net Initiative (ONI), a partnership between the University of Toronto and Harvard University, has released a report exposing Microsoft’s search engine Bing for censoring its site in the Middle East. The experiment showed that Bing “filters Arabic and English keywords that could yield sex- or LGBT-related images and content.”

Testing Bing's filter was conducted by manually inputting an exhaustive list of Arabic and English keywords, in a variety of combinations, from inside Arab countries. The MIT Technology Review points out that one “curious discovery” of the ONI report is the inconsistent filtering of some explicit words and not others. But Bing “left no stone unturned when it came to blocking words... having to do with homosexuality.”

ONI notes that while Microsoft claims that the blocks are consistent with the policies of the respective countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, “social filtering, including filtering, is not practiced by all countries in MENA.”

“Microsoft has signaled its willingness to be at the forefront in protecting freedom of expression around the world,” the report continues. “It is difficult to reconcile this position with Bing’s current filtering standards.”

But Andy Greenberg, writing on the Forbes blog Velocity, states that “Microsoft, unlike Google, never said that it wouldn’t be evil.” He claims that although Google does censor its search engine in a few countries, most notably China, “it censors in far fewer countries than Microsoft.”

Greenberg reiterates a point made in the ONI report itself-- that even in Arab countries such as Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, all of which have no internet censorship, “Microsoft has taken its own, prudish initiative here.”
Khaled Al-Saleh at The Next Web emphasizes that the Bing censorship is not unique to the Middle East, but also applies to India, Turkey, and many East Asian countries.

“This senseless move just crippled the internet further,” Al-Saleh laments. He advises users in the Middle East to bypass the filters by accessing Bing through the American or British portals.