Australia doesn’t exist. That’s at least according to Bing search results for some users on Wednesday when the Microsoft search engine cited long-running Internet conspiracy theories denying the existence of the country.
Several very real Australian users on Bluesky and Mastodon reported that when they searched for “does Australia exist” on Bing, it would come back with an emphatic “No” written in a text box before the link results.
“Bing is denying the existence of Australia,” the technology reporter Stilgherrian posted on Bluesky on Wednesday.
Photo: AFP
One user replied: “It’s buying into conspiracy theories.” Another asked: “Does that mean I don’t have to pay my bills?”
Some were able to replicate the result while others found Bing confirming that Australia does, in fact, exist.
One user pointed out that running the regular search and the AI search showed Bing Chat contradicting the search result.
The result appears in regular Bing searches, rather than the conversational searches Microsoft has integrated with its large language model artificial intelligence. Searches using Microsoft’s AI confirm the existence of Australia.
“Yes, Australia is a real country,” Bing co-pilot responded on Thursday.
“It is a sovereign nation that comprises the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands.
“However, there are some conspiracy theories that claim Australia doesn’t exist. These theories suggest that the country was invented by the British government as an excuse to execute tens of thousands of prisoners … These theories are not true and have been debunked by scientific evidence.”
A spokesperson for Microsoft said the issue had been rectified. “Thank you for bringing this to our attention,” the spokesperson said. “We’ve investigated this query and have rolled out a fix to address it.”
Guardian Australia was unable to replicate the result in Bing’s regular search on Thursday. One of the top Bing search results points to a Guardian article from 2018 mentioning that the part-joke conspiracy had been circulating on social media after originating on Reddit in 2017.
A since-deleted post shared 20,000 times on Facebook at the time claimed Australia is “one of the biggest hoaxes ever created.”
But the conspiracy reportedly dates back even further back to 2006, when a user on the Flat Earth Society forum reportedly claimed everything about Australia was made up and everyone who claimed to be Australian were “secret government agents.”
In the next few months tough decisions will need to be made by the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) and their pan-blue allies in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). It will reveal just how real their alliance is with actual power at stake. Party founder Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) faced these tough questions, which we explored in part one of this series, “Ko Wen-je, the KMT’s prickly ally,” (Aug. 16, page 12). Ko was open to cooperation, but on his terms. He openly fretted about being “swallowed up” by the KMT, and was keenly aware of the experience of the People’s First Party
Aug. 25 to Aug. 31 Although Mr. Lin (林) had been married to his Japanese wife for a decade, their union was never legally recognized — and even their daughter was officially deemed illegitimate. During the first half of Japanese rule in Taiwan, only marriages between Japanese men and Taiwanese women were valid, unless the Taiwanese husband formally joined a Japanese household. In 1920, Lin took his frustrations directly to the Ministry of Home Affairs: “Since Japan took possession of Taiwan, we have obeyed the government’s directives and committed ourselves to breaking old Qing-era customs. Yet ... our marriages remain unrecognized,
During the Metal Ages, prior to the arrival of the Dutch and Chinese, a great shift took place in indigenous material culture. Glass and agate beads, introduced after 400BC, completely replaced Taiwanese nephrite (jade) as the ornamental materials of choice, anthropologist Liu Jiun-Yu (劉俊昱) of the University of Washington wrote in a 2023 article. He added of the island’s modern indigenous peoples: “They are the descendants of prehistoric Formosans but have no nephrite-using cultures.” Moderns squint at that dynamic era of trade and cultural change through the mutually supporting lenses of later settler-colonialism and imperial power, which treated the indigenous as
Standing on top of a small mountain, Kim Seung-ho gazes out over an expanse of paddy fields glowing in their autumn gold, the ripening grains swaying gently in the wind. In the distance, North Korea stretches beyond the horizon. “It’s so peaceful,” says the director of the DMZ Ecology Research Institute. “Over there, it used to be an artillery range, but since they stopped firing, the nature has become so beautiful.” The land before him is the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, a strip of land that runs across the Korean peninsula, dividing North and South Korea roughly along the 38th parallel north. This
RSS