Why not. A human was asked to fulfill a request to block the "tank man" search in China and forgot to add the country restriction.

There is no way to know if it is true, but it is definitely possible. This is probably an interface that isn't used incredibly frequently and may not be as polished as one might hope.

We certainly know that explantation isn't true because they are continuing to censor the results after "fixing it". Searching "tank man" now gets you images of tanks and men and not the iconic image. We know they could get it right if they wanted to because the non-image search for the phrase works.

The iconic image comes up for me, could just be rolling out to massive infrastructure takes a hot minute

> A human was asked to fulfill a request to block the "tank man" search in China and forgot to add the country restriction.

But why would someone be asked to block it today - if it's to be blocked in China, wouldn't it be blocked all through out the year?

Why specifically would they ask it to be blocked just now and not years ago? I can't know for sure, but it just feels like a rogue employee deciding to block "tank man" globally on the anniversary ...

Was it blocked today, or did someone notice and make noise about it today?

The thing that pushes this more towards incredulity is that today is the anniversary of the famous photo.

Accidentally applied worldwide instead of just China sounds possible (or more possible than "my fingers slipped on the t, a, ... keys")

It is still not giving the correct results. Now Bing is pretending not to understand and giving innocuous pictures rather than the famous one. We can tell it's not just because of Bing's poor quality because similar searches, but slightly reworded get the iconic picture.

I don't see how it could've possibly been an accident when they "fix it" by slightly obscuring it. It's intentional deception and censorship by Microsoft. And it is particularly galling, because Microsoft, a massive and powerful international company without serious risk is cowering in fear of the same organization that one man, with everything to lose, stood against alone. Microsoft is trying to hide that he did so.