By: E&P Staff Journalism watchdog group Reporters Without Borders has found Yahoo to clearly be the worst offender in censorship tests the organization conducted on Chinese versions of four major Internet search engines.
Competing against Google, MSN as well as Chinese competitor Baidu, Yahoo scored the worst in terms of substituting pro-government search results when "subversive" terms were keyed in. While yahoo.cn censors results as strictly as baidu.cn, search engines google.cn and the beta version of msn.cn (beta.search.msn.com.cn) let through more information from sources that are not authorized by the authorities.
The study found that while Microsoft has said it does not censor, the Chinese version of its search engine displayed similar results to those of google.cn, which admits to filtering its content as per the Chinese government's guidelines. Like Google, however, Microsoft appears not to filter content by blocking certain keywords but by refusing to go to sites considered illegal by the authorities.
The press freedom expressed "shock" at the scale of censorship on yahoo.cn. It found that search results on "subversive" key words are 97% pro-Beijing. This means that Yahoo censors content even more than its Chinese competitor, Baidu. Above all, the report showed that requests using certain terms, such as 6-4 (June 4th is the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre), or "Tibet independence", would temporarily block the search tool.
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