"US Senator Urges Microsoft to Pull Bing Out of China", 13 March 2024

Microsoft is under fire from a US senator over its compliance with internet censorship in China.

Sen. Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, is calling on Microsoft to consider pulling its Bing search engine out of the country, after a Bloomberg Businessweek investigation revealed that the platform was shutting out information on human rights and democracy to satisfy China’s ruling Communist Party.

“US companies should not be facilitating PRC censorship,” Warner said in a statement ..., referring to the People’s Republic of China. “Giving the Chinese Communist Party the tools to censor references to Tiananmen Square, its abuses in Xinjiang, political speech related to Xi Jinping and more run counter to core US values around freedom of speech,” he added.

“Faced with similar dynamics, other US companies have decided to pull out of the PRC rather than be complicit with the CCP’s human rights abuses, and Bing should consider doing the same,” he said.

A Microsoft spokesman said in a statement that its Chinese version of Bing is “the least censored search engine” in the country and said that it'd rather have a presence there than not.