Sex, Social Mores, and Keyword Filtering: Microsoft Bing in the "Arabian Countries"

Microsoft’s Bing tailors its search engine to serve different countries and regions and offers its services in 41 languages. It has a filtering system at the keyword level for users in several countries. Users in the Arab countries are prevented from conducting certain search queries in both English and Arabic.

The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) (a collaboration of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies, Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internetⁱ &Society, and the SecDev Group) testing reveals that Microsoft filters Arabic and English keywords that could yield sex- or LGBTⁱ-related images and content.