It could be very uncomfortable for microsoft, politically, in the US, if it turns out they are applying Chinese-appeasing policies in the United States, to US users with their locale set to en-US (or even zh-US!). That's what I want to know; if somebody can prove there are blacklists checked into config files, I'd be very interested.
The work is quite interesting to read (having been on the other side of systems like this) but it uses statistical techniques like fisher tests in a fairly naive way. My next complaint is that they use the term censorship. I prefer to use the term "suppression of legitimately interesting results to further a political or business need".
At some point the paper devolves into speculating abotu the complex serving systems that produce suggestions at runtime (they are a function of thousands of feature variables). Probably the best readers of this paper would the (US-based ) technical lead and product manager for Bing, who should read it in detail and plug all the obvious bugs that were found.
This is a description of the work: https://citizenlab.ca/2022/05/bada-bing-bada-boom-microsoft-...
The work is quite interesting to read (having been on the other side of systems like this) but it uses statistical techniques like fisher tests in a fairly naive way. My next complaint is that they use the term censorship. I prefer to use the term "suppression of legitimately interesting results to further a political or business need".
At some point the paper devolves into speculating abotu the complex serving systems that produce suggestions at runtime (they are a function of thousands of feature variables). Probably the best readers of this paper would the (US-based ) technical lead and product manager for Bing, who should read it in detail and plug all the obvious bugs that were found.