Companies have to comply with differing laws and regulations based on the jurisdictions they operate in. I honestly don't have serious doubt that Microsoft does this in the US other than because of a technical error because they simply have no incentive to.

They can add this ability at any point anyway because putting a phrase into a word filter takes about 10 minutes I guess.

What is the logical alternative here, every American company leaves every other market because they have differing censorship laws? How is that helping anyone else?

You are way too scoped in on this specific issue. View the topic of bending to CCP will in other areas of tech, not just search. Cloud providers operating in China is a big area of concern. If these providers have built in the ability for the CCP to access user data, then there's no way they could ever stand up to US gov't asking for the same access. That's just a single example.

"If these providers have built in the ability for the CCP to access user data, then there's no way they could ever stand up to US gov't asking for the same access"

There are plenty of good reasons to refuse to cede to CCP demands but this makes no sense.

The only tech company that were able to mount serious resistance against a serious data access request by the US government were Apple and a couple of things:

1. They are a trillion dollar company.

2. They are primarily a hardware company, not a cloud services company

3. There is no guarantee (and I would argue rather unlikely) that if the FBI were unable to break the encryption of that phone independently that they would not have kept mounting pressure on Apple till they cracked.

It's a complete fantasy to believe that any individual or company has guaranteed data protection in the US or indeed most nation states. Once the government really want your data, they will get it with enough time.

I'm not sure I'm following this argument here. When the US government calls any major internet company and say "Hey we found this and this information on this page of yours and it's illegal to host the information, so please take it down, or else," does anybody seriously think that these companies will say no?

* Now, I'm definitely not a fan of the Chinese government, but the truth is that every government has power to order around any corporation that wants to do business in its border. The difference is how much you agree with each particular government, not whether they do it or not.

It seems fairly common for companies to deny and disclose requests from the US government. Not only is it a good publicity stunt advocating free speech / privacy, but what can the government do if it's not illegal content?

If the provider in question is hosting publicly visible pages with "offending" content, then of course anyone is free to "report" it or "request" it. If the provider is hosting end-to-end ecrypted data, then nobody should have access to it other than those with the proper keys. That includes the provider of the services. In that case, the provider can only say no to the gov't requests. If the provider has a different version of their platform available in China so that they conform to CCP demands of being able to access user content, then the provder would be lying to the US gov't request for access to user data too. So the suspicion that a US company operating in China with CCP approval immediately brings doubt onto their entire "we protect user privacy" into question.