Strange coincidence.
On the eve of the anniversary of the crackdown on Tianannem Square in Beijing in June 1989, the famous “Tank man” photo, the photo of the protester blocking a column of Chinese tanks in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 had disappeared from the engine of Bing research on the eve of the anniversary of the crackdown.
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"It is due to human error and we are actively working to resolve it," said a spokesperson for Microsoft, the computer giant that operates Bing, several hours after reports in the American press.
Conversely on "Google Images", the competitor service very largely dominant on the Internet, the search for "Tank man" always brought up hundreds of occurrences of the image of the American photographer Charlie Cole, among others.
All Tiananmen commemoration banned in China
This cliché remains largely unknown in China due to censorship.
Indeed, the country has a vast Internet surveillance system that allows it to purge any content deemed sensitive, such as political criticism or pornography.
And in the name of stability, the country requires the digital giants to have their own censors to carry out this task upstream.
Failure to comply with these regulations, the vast majority of foreign search engines and social networks (Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) are blocked in China and Internet users can only access them with bypass software (VPN). .
Any commemoration of the Tiananmen crackdown is prohibited in China, and the semi-autonomous region of Hong Kong was the only place where it was tolerated.
But with Beijing's turn of the screw against all forms of opposition in the former British colony, the candlelight vigil was banned this year. The park where it stands remained empty for the first time in 32 years.