These 6 tech companies have made the controversial decision to try to operate in China, where the government can demand social media posts be removed or search results be censored

According to The Guardian in 2014, searches for the Dalai Lama and Tiananmen Square, among other topics, returned different results in Chinese and English, suggesting that Microsoft was applying Chinese censorship rules to users not in China as well. Microsoft blamed this on a "systems error."

And earlier this year, Bing was briefly blocked in China, reportedly for "illegal content," but service was eventually restored.

Now, Chinese-language censorship is no longer applied through Bing, but the search engine still censors results within China.

The censorship applies to Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, too. According to Wired, in 2014, Hong Kong legislator Charles Mok had a LinkedIn post referencing Tiananmen Square taken down, and he received a message from the company explaining why the post was not visible.

LinkedIn openly supports the censors of China and should be condemned for such acts. pic.twitter.com/mauLDlIOpp

In August 2018, The Intercept published Google's plan to launch a censorship-compliant search engine in China, codenamed Project Dragonfly.

The report said that Dragonfly would "blacklist sensitive queries," meaning no results would show when people searched certain banned terms. In December 2018, Google CEO Sundar Pichai testified before Congress that the company had no plans to launch a search engine in China. The project has reportedly been halted.

Google has been blocked in China since 2010, when it pulled out of the country at the behest of cofounder Sergey Brin, as part of his motto, "Don't be evil."

In 2018, Airbnb canceled reservations and removed listings in Beijing during China's National People's Congress, an annual two-week meeting of parliament. The company told Business Insider it did this due to "external factors," in order to "be good neighbors."

Airbnb also removed listings and canceled bookings ahead of the Communist Party's five-yearly congress.

Esports competitor Chung Ng Wai, or Blitzchung, yelled "Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our age" during an interview at the Hearthstone tournament in Taiwan. Now, Blizzard Entertainment is facing criticism for banning Blitzchung from competitions for a year and rescinding his prize money.

Chinese company Tencent, which also owns WeChat, owns 5% of Activision Blizzard, Blizzard's parent company.

In September, The Guardian published internal documents from TikTok that show moderators were instructed to censor political content that could anger the Chinese government, including Tibetan independence and Tiananmen Square. TikTok said the guidelines were not current, and had been revised in May.

Read more: Sen. Marco Rubio is asking the US government to investigate TikTok over claims it's censoring content that might upset China

A TikTok spokesperson told Business Insider that China does not ask owner ByteDance to censor content on TikTok, because the app doesn't operate in the country; its Chinese counterpart Douyin does.