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The "Tank Man" stands alone in front of four approaching tanks
Photo: Jeff Widener / AP
Anyone looking for a picture of "Tank Man" in the search engine Bing on Friday evening only saw a brief note instead of photos: "No search results for" Tank Man "." opposing a Chinese column of tanks.
According to user reports, the image had disappeared from the image search in the USA as well as in other countries such as Singapore, Great Britain or Germany.
According to Microsoft, it was an accident.
The disappearance of the picture was due to an "unintentional human error," said a Microsoft spokesman on Friday evening.
Work is being done to fix the problem, the spokesman said.
The picture has been displayed again since the early morning hours.
The incident happened on the 32nd anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, of all places.
During the bloody crackdown on democracy protests on June 4, 1989 in Beijing, the now banned photo of the man in the white shirt was also taken.
Because the man has never been identified, he is often referred to as "Tank Man".
Otherwise, Chinese search engine censorship does not spill over to other countries
Chinese authorities have reportedly required search engine services operating in the country to censor certain results.
However, cases are rarely known where these restrictions also affect search results in other countries.
The head of the US civil rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation criticized the incident.
The so-called content moderation, i.e. deciding what is blocked and what remains online, is impossible to implement perfectly and errors constantly occur.
But there could be a much more problematic explanation here: "In the worst case, we are dealing with deliberate suppression at the request of a powerful state," said Greene.
A significant proportion of the Microsoft workforce responsible for the Bing search engine work in China, according to former employees.
This also included employees who work on image recognition programs.
Even in the search engine DuckDuckGo, which pursues a privacy-friendly approach, the "Tank Man" image had temporarily disappeared.
This could be because the search engine gets some of its results from Bing.
On Friday, however, the photo was accessible via the search of the Bing competitor Google.
In China, where the internet is strictly controlled by the authorities, access to Google is blocked.
The picture is censored in the most important Chinese tracing service Baidu.
afp / reuters / hpp