Microsoft Corp.’s Bing search engine blocked content in the U.S. deemed politically sensitive to China’s government on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, a move the company said was an accident that it would correct.
Bing users noted on social media Friday that U.S. searches on the website’s images and videos tabs for “Tank Man”—the iconic image of a man standing in front of a column of tanks after the 1989 massacre—didn’t return any hits. Searches of the same phrase on Bing’s main page, however, returned hundreds of thousands of results.
“This is due to an accidental human error and we are actively working to resolve this,” a Microsoft representative said in a statement Friday.
The statement comes as people on Friday marked the date in 1989 when Chinese troops around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square gunned down pro-democracy protesters.
Bing is the second-biggest search engine world-wide with a roughly 2% market share, according to May figures from Statcounter. Google dominates with a 92% global share of the market.
