“Tank man” image search blocked on Bing and DuckDuckGo
If you google “tank man” and click on images in Bing and DDG either nothing shows up (Bing) or unrelated photos shows up (DDG). Images show up in Google.
What does HN make of this? I would think that Bing/DDG would have separate search results in China so I’m quite surprised to see this happening outside of China.
This shouldn't have been flagged. My understanding is that posts which comment on current events from a tech perspective are 100% within the bounds of acceptable behavior here.
I confirm the symptoms happened for me as well. I used the !s bang to have startpage search it and startpage returned the image in the carousel and image results.
I'm not certain I can continue to use duck duck go if it is going to give me results subjected to CCP censorship. I switched to it from Startpage as it had a less shady reputation than the latter, but Startpage hasn't messed with my actual searches like DDG now has though.
Why is this flagged, and why did it disappear from the front page?
I've also noticed that people questioning why this has been flagged are being downvoted. Pretty suspicious given today is the anniversary of the massacre.
That’s very odd. In DDG, searching for “tank man” with “Safe search: moderate” returns 4 pictures of men in or next to tanks. Setting “Safe search: off” returns 0 pictures, not even the 4 utterly safe images from the “moderate” search.
I have no idea how to get Dang's attention, but can we talk about why this thread is flagged? How is this not blatant censorship? Tons of people are NOT seeing this thread, it was on the front page before it got flagged, obviously the intention of whoever flagged it.
Does surprise me to be honest, of course the CCP no doubt does exert power over companies that want to work in China and this can influence behaviour outside the country too.
But surprised to see this so blatant and really quite clumsily too as easy to find in other contexts without difficulty.
Bing is usually allowed in China past the Great Firewall so it's not too surprising that it's censoring.
I think this is what people were afraid of happening with Googles project to reenter the Chinese search market if some of the censorship rules would leak back into the US by accident.
This post should not be flagged!
DDG: image searching "tank man": "blocked by safe search" and then "sorry no results here" when disabling safe search entirely
Weird. I’m seeing this in Canada too. I see the Wikipedia article too but no images show up on the image search.
This should make every pause for a moment.... seriously.
Global censorship of very real events where citizens were standing up for freedom.
I get the image if I'm more specific on DDG, via "tank man tiananmen square". Maybe just DDG needing more context than Google?
Why has this been flagged?!
Same here. "tank man" image search in Bing returns absolutely no result. However "tank man tiananmen square" returns images but half of them with no image of a tank.
Added this to my favourites just so I remember it did exist
There is an inevitability of multinationals in bowing to censorship. Many see cracking the Chinese market as the white whale. Censorship costs a drop in the bucket compared to the profits that can be made, they’ll fight tooth and nail on taxes and general business regulation but won’t give a damn for censorship.
Quite frankly I doubt even western outrage would matter, in 5 minutes everyone has already moved onto the next story.
That's incredibly disappointing. :(
This definitely should not be flagged.
I can confirm that in Eastern Europe Bing and DDG image bring nothing on 'tank man'.
However 'tank man' brings the relevant wikipedia as the top result in regular search.
So Bing and by extension DDG must have forgotten to turn off their CCP flag globally. At least that's my somewhat charitable interpretation.
I am guessing DDG is piggy backing off Bing and therein lies the problem.
"tank man china" gets me the expected results on DDG
Remember that DuckDuckGo is a thin facade over Bing results.
I'm quite disappointed in Microsoft with their blatant submission to the CCP. I hope DDG switches search providers, because this is simply unacceptable behavior.
I can confirm this, using DDG in USA. What the hell?
Anyone know how to raise awareness for this issue? I’ve shared this friends/family but would be great to get the press/talking heads on this. Maybe the majority of Americans don’t care and this isn’t something that would gain traction but I sure do care a lot.
This is interesting. On the web results it shows up, but under images it doesn't show anything.
The Wikipedia article about tank man is the very first result on DDG, and that article has the iconic photo. If they were trying to censor this, wouldn’t they hide those search results? I don’t get the fuss.
@dang why is this flagged!?
>> If you google “tank man” and click on images in Bing and DDG
Use of the word 'google' here for searching is odd and could have been avoided.
"We all live in America" -Rammstein, 2004
"..." -..., 2021
Odd, just 5 unrelated pictures on DDG. I thought maybe safe search might have something to do with it but with that off I get 0 results.
Qwant.com also does not show any tank man images.
Can confirm, tank man with or without quotes yields zero results under images with safe search off. That’s nuts.
Bing, not logged in, gave me the Wikipedia entry and an article about the photographer, 30 years later.
guys, is it real? I tried to search the "tank man" word in Bing.
I can turn off the security search. And I can get the exact tank man image.
My IP is Hong Kong, so what happened here?
Now try the search (without quotes)’img src’ on DDG images vs Yahoo images and ask yourself what’s up with that.
try "tiananmen tank"
works on bing
i am getting google results outside of china for that search term. first result is the wikipedia article with that same title. and many image results as well.
dumb algorithm can't figure out the context of "Tank man"
Tested this on Bing/DuckDuckGo/Google/Yandex/Baidu. Only failed to show up on Baidu.
@dang This should not be flagged! This is important history that should never be allowed to be forgotten