Bing Delivers Adult Search Results To Underage Facebook Users

With Facebook reaching 300 million users last month, the reach of information on Facebook is one of the largest on the World Wide Web. When Facebook announced that their search results for US users would be supplied by Bing (known as Microsoft Live Search at the time) in June 2008, it was evident that Microsoft had struck gold in reaching new users. As this deal has been rolled out to other nations using Facebook we have witnessed firsthand the results that Bing can serve to users. And this is where we received a rather large shock.

Onsite Search

As a company using social media for marketing on a daily basis we were testing out a variety of demographic/relational tests on Facebook and were dismayed to see that certain onsite searches returned inappropriate & adult results – irrespective of your age settings.

We did a simple search for a friend called Lynn Summer. As per usual we were delivered with Group results, People results and Web results – with one big difference:

Summer Lynn Facebook Search
(a search result for Lynn Summer in Facebook)

Evidently, it appears as if an adult performer goes by the name Summer Lynn, which has prompted these results, but the alarming thing is that carrying out the same search directly on Bing.com does not show these results:

Lynn Summer Bing Search Results
(a search result for Lynn Summer in Bing)

Upon more research it appears that when Safe Search settings are turned off in Bing we got the same results as seen on Facebook highlighting the fact that results delivered by Bing via Facebook are not adhering to the Moderate Safe Search settings normally utilised by Bing by default.

Age Related Searches

On first impressions one would assume that Facebook & Bing have worked closely together to tailor these search results based on their user’s demographics to ensure people are not subjected to inappriorate content dependant on age. However, after creating an under 18 account (a 14 year old in fact), we tried the same searches and found the exact same results. We also tried some innocuous searches that a child would perhaps search for. Once again we were met with adult-themed results:

Granny Search Results in Facebook
(a search result for Granny in Facebook)

Granny Search Results in Bing
(a search result for Granny in Bing)

Facebook have gone so far as to state that content of this nature might be found on their site:

Despite Facebook's safety and privacy controls, Facebook cannot guarantee that the site is entirely free of illegal, offensive, pornographic or otherwise inappropriate material, or that its members will not encounter inappropriate or illegal conduct from other members. Consequently, you may encounter such content and conduct.

Whilst the results above are shocking, we must give credit where it is due and congratulate Facebook/Bing for not delivering any search results for the “usual” adult related search queries such as “p*rn”, “t*ts” etc.

However, given the implications of the above findings, we can only questions whether Facebook/Bing should look more closely at the results displayed within the search results especially given their vast user base of 13-17 year olds in the United Kingdom alone.