Ask HN: “Tank man” image search blocked on Bing and DuckDuckGo
If you google “tank man” and click on images in Bing and DDG either nothing shows up (Bing) or unrelated photos shows up (DDG). Images show up in Google.
What does HN make of this? I would think that Bing/DDG would have separate search results in China so I’m quite surprised to see this happening outside of China.
This shouldn't have been flagged. My understanding is that posts which comment on current events from a tech perspective are 100% within the bounds of acceptable behavior here.
They totally are, threads discussing such things make it to the top of the front page _all_ the time. It's very suspect that this thread is flagged.
Everything "controversial" or anti-narrative since October 2020 I've posted has been flagged. Frankly, I think it's mostly bots or people being paid to do so. IMO HN should be changing it's flag policy.
This isn't remotely close to true. I think you may be falling prey to the notice-dislike bias, which unfortunately leads to false feelings of generality.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
That’s fair, could also be the topics im weighing in on are more prone.
From personal experience, I’m experiencing flags like I’ve never seen before. I have several IRL fiends who no longer post or visit HN because of it (because reasonable discussion is being disappeared).
I’d be curious to know the attrition rate after flags. Also if the number of flags for long term members have increased. The data’s all public (I think), so I can do the analysis. But I find it interesting.
I'd be happy to look up specific numbers if it's something I can do quickly. Unfortunately today has been a tornado and I haven't quite landed yet.
I think I speak for all of us, when I say we appreciate all you do!
It's routine for threads discussing such things to make it to the front page and routine for them to get flagged. This is the cycle of life on HN. And rightly so: otherwise the front page would consist entirely of the sensational/hottest topics and flamewars.
Very suspicious. I suspect employees are flagging this post, but my suspicions aren’t really founded. Is there a way to unflag?
Normally @dang turns up to clarify and fix things
Posts are flagged if a certain number of users flag them, not just mods/admins.
Is it possible to ban all users that flagged this post? Or at the very least permanently disable their downvoting and flagging power?
There was another submission about tank man, just a CNN article on it. That submission has been marked as a dupe, despite the link not appearing in a recent search.
I think users can flag, but not mark as dupe
I'd like to hear their explanation first. There might be people who honestly believe that no political content should on HN.
To allow that rationale, you'd want to look over the commenting & voting history of anyone claiming that. I bet they all turn out to have funny definitions of what counts and what doesn't.
That's very disproportionate (but I think it's ridiculous that this is flagged).
I didn't flag it, but it's a boring link to an empty search result with no discussion except outrage. I know political topics can be on-topic here, but why is this worthy of a HN submission and not being flagged? What's particularly interesting about it?
(And before you respond with the obvious - Microsoft has clearly blocked this, and it's in China's interest for them to do so, yes, but can you explain why you think that is that particularly Hacker Newsworthy? Like, the only thing you've posted is 5x comments of single line outrage - you've called for people to be banned, DDG to be removed from a list, called it suspicious, cast aspersions on HN employees - you don't seem to be trying to start a detailed discussion about anything related - and neither does almost everyone else.)
Welp, dang has commented on this post and it's still flagged. Per the guidelines:
> It means that users flagged a post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on Hacker News.
> Moderators sometimes also add [flagged] (though not usually on submissions), and sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair.
Is it therefore the case that the Moderators consider this flagging to be fair?
@Dang was this a user or a mod action?
Dang is probably on top of the situation given that another tank man post was marked as dupe, which requires admin powers.
[flagged] on submissions nearly always means users flagged it.
This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#flag.
Edit: details of what happened are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397230
The flagging is clearly unfair...so why hasn't it been removed?
A lot of CCP fans out there it seems.
I've removed the flags now.
That last bit breaks the site guidelines. Can you please review them and stick to the rules? We'd appreciate it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Disappointed in the flagging too
Whatever happened to the "vouch" option?
I wanted to, but it seems to be gone. :-(
[Ed. I see, flagged but not dead, so no vouching...]
It only appears once the article is actually dead (as far as I've experienced). I have no idea why that's the case.
So until it gets flagged enough to become dead, it's in a kind of flag purgatory and can't be vouched for?
Separately, I'd be curious to know what systems are in place to deal with bad-faith flagging. There doesn't seem to be any mention of this in the Hacker News FAQ. Not saying that's what happened here, but it seems like a situation that would come up sooner or later.
Sorry for speculation but if the upvote to comments ratio are off, they might get auto flagged too, right?
Details of what happened are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27397230.
Since people are asking "if all that is true, why does it still say [flagged]", I've turned off flags on the above post now.
I confirm the symptoms happened for me as well. I used the !s bang to have startpage search it and startpage returned the image in the carousel and image results.
I'm not certain I can continue to use duck duck go if it is going to give me results subjected to CCP censorship. I switched to it from Startpage as it had a less shady reputation than the latter, but Startpage hasn't messed with my actual searches like DDG now has though.
Doesn't DDG use Bing on the backend (at least to some extent? Forgive my ignorance here). My hunch is that it has more to do with that, as opposed to it being a conscious decision by people at DDG.
They do bulk purchase search results from Bing.
Agreed. But if Bing is going to pull stuff like this, and DDG just wraps Bing results, it can leave users with questions about what else may be being censored, directly or not.
That's fair!
‘Tank man China’ returns the image on DDG as does bing (Although not the first result). I think you are correct that this could be on Microsoft.
DDG should seriously consider the provider if there is going to be political censorship from their sources.
Abhorrent behavior by Bing. Hopefully a provider issue on DDG’s end.
Why is this flagged, and why did it disappear from the front page?
I've also noticed that people questioning why this has been flagged are being downvoted. Pretty suspicious given today is the anniversary of the massacre.
That’s very odd. In DDG, searching for “tank man” with “Safe search: moderate” returns 4 pictures of men in or next to tanks. Setting “Safe search: off” returns 0 pictures, not even the 4 utterly safe images from the “moderate” search.
It did when I searched 5 minutes ago. Now I get no results and "Images blocked by safe search" on strict/moderate, and no results on "off".
Oh wow, can confirm. Now I’m not getting any results either.
back to 4 images for me now
And the image that was shown on the wikipedia insert on normal ddg search has vanished.
for me it works such that if I search for text results and switch to images, the 4 are shown. But they disappear afer any refresh of the page, no matter safe search settings
I have no idea how to get Dang's attention, but can we talk about why this thread is flagged? How is this not blatant censorship? Tons of people are NOT seeing this thread, it was on the front page before it got flagged, obviously the intention of whoever flagged it.
Hopefully Dang can sticky this for a bit to make up for the lost time.
I've sent an email (as suggested in prior threads) regarding the flagging of this article. I am sure other users have as well. Hopefully someone makes a comment here soon.
The thread could have been flagged because 50 people clicks "flag" in the first few minutes.
Dang was working 12 hours ago, he's likely off at the moment.
There are other moderators, though dang remains the public face.
If you were to read the site guidelines, you would have a clear idea of how to get my attention.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
@dang I just read the guidelines and don’t see any mention of how to get your/a mods attention in posts unless you’re referring to “email hn@ycombinator.com”?
Is that the proper way?
Yes. In particular, this note that calls that out explicitly is applicable:
> "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
Also note the Contact link in the footer.
(Also note that @dang doesn't do anything other than display the five glyphs @, d, a, n, and g.)
Precisely!
Does surprise me to be honest, of course the CCP no doubt does exert power over companies that want to work in China and this can influence behaviour outside the country too.
But surprised to see this so blatant and really quite clumsily too as easy to find in other contexts without difficulty.
This is definitely clumsy. Compare with searching for "坦克人" which gives all sort of tanks just not the one you're looking for (Google shows the same image for both English and Chinese search term).
Searching for "tank guy" without quotes gives you pictures of the tank man.
Bing is usually allowed in China past the Great Firewall so it's not too surprising that it's censoring.
I think this is what people were afraid of happening with Googles project to reenter the Chinese search market if some of the censorship rules would leak back into the US by accident.
That is what I am worried about. That our capitalist society is easily subverted by money, either directly or indirectly, by totalitarian regimes. You see that with sports leagues and movie studios bowing to China, and especially by soccer bowing to Arabian countries. That leads to content bordering propaganda and self-censorship of entities in democratic countries for the sake of a quick dime.
This post should not be flagged!
DDG: image searching "tank man": "blocked by safe search" and then "sorry no results here" when disabling safe search entirely
Weird. I’m seeing this in Canada too. I see the Wikipedia article too but no images show up on the image search.
This should make every pause for a moment.... seriously.
Global censorship of very real events where citizens were standing up for freedom.
I get the image if I'm more specific on DDG, via "tank man tiananmen square". Maybe just DDG needing more context than Google?
nah, it has results for "tank men", so absence of results altogether is definitely censorship
In general a less specific query should return more results. It seems like Bing is explicitly blocking that search.
I don’t think so, the substring should match right?
Something funny is happening
Search for tank man - 4 images
Search for tank man China - many images including the one we expect as the first result
Search for tank man again - Images blocked by safe search.
The same search gave me different results!
This query gave me 2 results, but others had random images (e.g. a happy seal), and in other places I see a white 'no preview available' icon, for instance on the Amnesty page that contains the image.
I searched for “fnord cakewalk” and got a pageful of results. It’s impossible that 2 generic words like “tank” and “man” give 0 results whatsoever for organic reasons.
"tank woman" and "tank guy" returns lots of results.
I get the image, but I have to scroll some, and click on "Show more" even though there is only one row of results at a time...
Why has this been flagged?!
very very odd....
Same here. "tank man" image search in Bing returns absolutely no result. However "tank man tiananmen square" returns images but half of them with no image of a tank.
Added this to my favourites just so I remember it did exist
There is an inevitability of multinationals in bowing to censorship. Many see cracking the Chinese market as the white whale. Censorship costs a drop in the bucket compared to the profits that can be made, they’ll fight tooth and nail on taxes and general business regulation but won’t give a damn for censorship.
Quite frankly I doubt even western outrage would matter, in 5 minutes everyone has already moved onto the next story.
Step 1 is bringing awareness. If HN censors this, we’re nipping it in the bud.
That's incredibly disappointing. :(
This definitely should not be flagged.
I can confirm that in Eastern Europe Bing and DDG image bring nothing on 'tank man'.
However 'tank man' brings the relevant wikipedia as the top result in regular search.
So Bing and by extension DDG must have forgotten to turn off their CCP flag globally. At least that's my somewhat charitable interpretation. I am guessing DDG is piggy backing off Bing and therein lies the problem.
"tank man china" gets me the expected results on DDG
But no images on Bing for the same query.
Didn't work for me, though it does link to the wikipedia article as the first link.
Interesting, the first 4 results are pictures of tanks, which ddg is currently (for me) showing for an image search for "tank man"
The 5th result is a picture of Chinese police on segways in modernish day Tianamen square
"China still gets annoyed with images showing the famous ...markets.businessinsider.com"
but that doesn't show up on "tank man" alone.
The actual famous image is result 10 and 11 (slight difference, 10 has 4 tanks, 11 taken from a different angle and presumably a little earlier has 3)
Remember that DuckDuckGo is a thin facade over Bing results.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395028 this was marked as dupe also, even though it wasn't ?
Thank you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
I'm quite disappointed in Microsoft with their blatant submission to the CCP. I hope DDG switches search providers, because this is simply unacceptable behavior.
I can confirm this, using DDG in USA. What the hell?
This thread is now flagged. What the hell?
What does it mean when a thread is flagged?
> "What does [flagged] mean?"
> "It means that users flagged a post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on Hacker News."
> "Moderators sometimes also add [flagged] (though not usually on submissions), and sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Just switch default search to start page: https://support.startpage.com/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Artic...
Anyone know how to raise awareness for this issue? I’ve shared this friends/family but would be great to get the press/talking heads on this. Maybe the majority of Americans don’t care and this isn’t something that would gain traction but I sure do care a lot.
This is interesting. On the web results it shows up, but under images it doesn't show anything.
How can we get DDG removed from https://www.privacytools.io/providers/search-engines/?
How is this issue about privacy?
FYI there is another similar (and unflagged) story currently on the front-page:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27395635
I'm surprised this story wasn't unflagged to be honest
Plenty of people still on this page and downvoting. Irony is had they not flagged this ask-hn in the first place it would likely have gone quiet instead of Streislanding all over the place.
The Wikipedia article about tank man is the very first result on DDG, and that article has the iconic photo. If they were trying to censor this, wouldn’t they hide those search results? I don’t get the fuss.
@dang why is this flagged!?
>> If you google “tank man” and click on images in Bing and DDG
Use of the word 'google' here for searching is odd and could have been avoided.
"We all live in America" -Rammstein, 2004
"..." -..., 2021
Odd, just 5 unrelated pictures on DDG. I thought maybe safe search might have something to do with it but with that off I get 0 results.
Qwant.com also does not show any tank man images.
Can confirm, tank man with or without quotes yields zero results under images with safe search off. That’s nuts.
Bing, not logged in, gave me the Wikipedia entry and an article about the photographer, 30 years later.
It does for web results, click on "images" and it shows nothing.
Try image search for
tank man tiananmen square
"Tank man" alone is not specific enough for image search. It's probably found in main search only because Wikipedia uses that phrase.
Right, but it show no results at all. It is clearly not an algorithmic choice, someone has manually made the query return nothing. When I search other variations it simply gives me completely irrelevant images, such as images from the square in modern times.
I am an unabashed Microsoft fan, but this is abhorrent. I really hope they put out a statement and correct this. To me it would be like searching for "holocaust" or "Emmett Till" and getting no results.
guys, is it real? I tried to search the "tank man" word in Bing. I can turn off the security search. And I can get the exact tank man image. My IP is Hong Kong, so what happened here?
Why is this flagged!?
Now try the search (without quotes)’img src’ on DDG images vs Yahoo images and ask yourself what’s up with that.
Which flag?
try "tiananmen tank" works on bing
The point is not to find the image somehow.
The point is to explain why it does not show up where it obviously should, and even more unbelievably, why no images at all show up for such a generic pair of words.
There should at least be an infinite scroll of other images men and water tanks etc.
This exposes that the cause is not natural or innocent.
i am getting google results outside of china for that search term. first result is the wikipedia article with that same title. and many image results as well.
dumb algorithm can't figure out the context of "Tank man"
I’d expect it to bring up something though, given that search engines can pull a ton of irrelevant content farm crap at the least for some of the most specific searches I’ve done.
There is no legitimate explaination for why there is no infinite scroll of for example, water tanks.
Tested this on Bing/DuckDuckGo/Google/Yandex/Baidu. Only failed to show up on Baidu.
Even Baidu, for "Tienanmen Square protest", returns one relevant result:
http://edu.sina.com.cn/en/2006-01-24/185435649.html
I only tried "tank man".
On images?
DDG returns the wikipedia page (and the image in the summary), but in images it's a different story
No, just web.
@dang This should not be flagged! This is important history that should never be allowed to be forgotten