(PresidentialWire.com)- As the world remembered the tragedy of the Tiananmen Square Massacre last week on its 32nd anniversary, Big Tech blocked users from searching for the legendary image of a man standing up to the Chinese Communist Party and literally standing right in front of a tank. The image, known as “Tank Man,” was not available via image search on Microsoft’s “Bing” search engine.
Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz hit out at Microsoft and Big Tech more generally for its allegiance to China and ties to the authoritarian regime. He mocked Microsoft after the company claimed there was a glitch that prevented any results from appearing when users entered the search term “Tank Man.”
On Saturday morning, Cruz responded to social media posts on Twitter, sarcastically asking the company about the “accidental” removal of the 1989 photograph from their pages.
“Was the ‘accidental human’ who made the error by any chance the head of China Marketing for Microsoft?” he asked his Twitter followers.
Microsoft insisted that the removal of the image was not intentional, telling Vice Motherboard On Friday that it was an “accidental human error” and that they were actively working to resolve the problem.
But how, exactly, does accidental human error stop people from searching for an extremely specific image relating to the massacre of thousands of innocent Chinese citizens by the authoritarian communist Chinese regime?
The image was not only blocked in the United States but also in Switzerland, France, and the United Kingdom. Users could search variants of words relating to “tank” and “man,” and the search engine was working in all other regards, but only the extremely specific term “tank man” drew zero results.
Thankfully, you can once again search for Tank Man on Bing image search, but now might be the time to start moving away from Big Tech’s offerings and choosing alternatives like DuckDuckGo.
