Microsoft's Bing software automatically censors itself in the Middle East, according to the The Open Net Initiative.

The outfit has released a report exposing Microsoft’s search engine Bing for censoring its site in the Middle East. The experiment showed that Bing “filters Arabic and English keywords that could yield sex or similar content.”

The boffins put an exhaustive list of Arabic and English keywords, in a variety of combinations, from inside Arab countries. Bing “left no stone unturned when it came to blocking words... having to do with homosexuality.”

It appears that the blocks are consistent with the policies of the respective countries in the Middle East and North Africa but at the same time insists that it is not filtering content. Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, have no internet censorship, and yet Microsoft has taken its own, prudish initiative.