Microsoft hosts ready-to-use political censorship software on its Azure Marketplace in China, further evidence of how the company has aided the development and implementation of the country’s repressive system of political control.
An Associated Press investigation revealed American tech companies like Dell, IBM, and Microsoft are increasingly recognized to have played a pivotal role in the construction of the modern Chinese surveillance state over the last two decades by providing critical hardware and software.
Less documented is the role some U.S. companies have played in enabling mass censorship. Microsoft in particular aids and abets censorship by the Chinese government far more proactively than previously reported. The company has previously come under fire for censoring Bing search results in China. Open-source evidence now indicates that Microsoft hosts two Chinese apps on its Chinese Azure Marketplace that further facilitate censorship of political topics. These plug-and-play products can be deployed by other Azure-using enterprises across China, enabling China’s aggressive censorship of political speech in the country.
The Chinese Azure Marketplace currently features a product by a Chinese big data company, Data Grand (达观数据), entitled “Text Political and Pornographic Identification” (文本鉴黄鉴政识别). The product description proclaims that it “provid[es] clients with high-quality text content review services” and can determine if content “violates political or pornographic regulations, also giving the severity of the violation.”
In 2024, reporting by the news outlet Rest of the World revealed that Data Grand had been supported by Microsoft’s prestigious Chinese startup accelerator program in 2017 — and at that time it was accepted, the startup was already advertising its censorship capabilities on its website. Microsoft has evidently not severed the relationship.
A second product that Microsoft hosts on Azure Marketplace is called Tezign (特赞), which can “[a]utomatically identify text content in images and videos, promptly detect non-compliant content such as pornography, violence, politically sensitive content, and malicious advertising, mitigate business risks, and significantly reduce manual review costs.”
Like Data Grand, Tezign also benefitted from Microsoft’s startup accelerator in China. It was accepted into the accelerator — likened to Harvard by Chinese media for its selectivity — in 2018. The Microsoft relationship has continued since. By 2023, Tezign was in the “Pegasus” program, an extended, two-year cohort for Chinese tech companies to receive even more support from Microsoft, including access to OpenAI technology starting in 2024, which at the time was not available in China. Microsoft stated that Tezign secured a key client, the Fortune 500 multinational Unilever, through the program.
Microsoft’s support of the Chinese censorship regime through its Azure Marketplace is part of a broader pattern of complicity of U.S. companies in profiting off of China’s burgeoning surveillance state.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
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