Microsoft Declined To Comment On Child Pornography Appearing On Bing

Bing, Microsoft's search engine, is facing an outrage for including pornographic child images in its search result. On Thursday, TechCrunch described the issue, saying it asked AntiToxin Technologies to conduct a study on the images propagated, it's a startup in Israel specializing in online safety.

Not only all states in the United States but also more than 93 other countries in the world consider pornographic images of children (underage who are not allowed to have sex) illegal acts. Now, even copying the research results of AntiToxin or accessing online child pornography sites will result in arrests.

Results with illegal content on Bing

According to the study, when searching for terms related to pedophiles, Bing search engines will provide results related to child pornography. Not only that, but the site also has an algorithm that normally responds to these searches, suggesting more searches for child porn pictures.

For example, researchers searched for a popular chat website for teens and included the word "kids." Bing gave results and other search suggestions words such as "13-year-old girls," which reportedly surfaces "extensive child pornography when searched."

People should not practice the research process like AntiToxin since they were allowed to do this research following law enforcement. While Microsoft must be the one to explain this clearly, they only said that they acknowledged that there were some problems and did not answer any questions.

Bing's similar image feature provides more illegal images for children

According to TechCrunch, the case shows that tech giant Microsoft has failed to prevent pedophiles from searching and seeking child pornography images. These keywords have also been searched on Google's platform, but they do not provide such illegal results and suggestions. In the previous quarter, Microsoft earned $8.8 billion in profits, so they have the ability to invest in solving this problem, involving both human moderators and scalable technology measures.

Josh Constine, a reporter from TechCrunch, previously reported child exploitation on the popular messaging platform – WhatsApp, also gave comment about this incident. Constine said Microsoft told that Bing's engineers are currently fixing this issue. But except for some terms used by AntiToxin banned, "others still surface illegal content."

Jordi Ribas - the Vice President of Microsoft Corporate, sent a statement to a public relations company that is completely different. They said they appreciate TechCrunch's discovery and announcement and that the company took immediate actions to remove the searches. The company has learned a lesson in this issue and will make the necessary improvements to Bing's defense system.

Suggestions that appear on Bing also show illegal images of child abuse

Facing the question if Microsoft had removed all search terms related to child porn, the PR representatives of the company said it has "nothing further to share."

In this sensitive issue, everyone is hoping that Microsoft can handle this case as transparently as possible. However, the company seems to be more and more secretive when it comes to this issue every time. Microsoft seems to be entering a defensive posture when asked questions about this incident. However, "we do the best job we can" is the answer. Clearly, that's not even close to enough.

Constine pointed out in the shortcomings in Microsoft 's answer that they did not say how many Bing’s human moderators there are or if it plans to increase its personnel to increase safety and defense systems. On the contrary, the company harshly rejected these questions and said that the reporters always thought that they were not doing well, ruining everything and completely wrong in this case.

In fact, Microsoft is truly wrong and completely failed in this case. Just because other companies followed Microsoft to use PhotoDNA technology to detect illegal images doesn't mean it's innocent.

The widespread of child pornography has always been a problem on social networks and the Internet. Previously, giant tech companies like Facebook, Vine, and WhatsApp had similar incidents. The important thing is how to solve this problem of Microsoft in the near future because it currently only blocks keyword lists provided by AntiToxin Technologies. That action only helps it cool the public's attention to this incident, it needs to do more to prevent this problem thoroughly.