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.”
The problem with Marx’s famous remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce, is that the first time is usually farce as well. This week Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob” with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The visit was an instant international media hit, with major media reporting almost entirely shorn of context. “Taiwan’s main opposition leader landed in China Tuesday for a rare visit aimed at cross-strait ‘peace’”, crowed Agence-France Presse (AFP) from Shanghai. Rare!
What is the importance within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of the meeting between Xi Jinping (習近平), the leader Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), the leader of the KMT? Local media is an excellent guide to determine how important — or unimportant — a news event is to the public. Taiwan has a vast online media ecosystem, and if a news item is gaining traction among readers, editors shift resources in near real time to boost coverage to meet the demand and drive up traffic. Cheng’s China trip is among the top headlines, but by no means
Sunflower movement superstar Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) once quipped that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could nominate a watermelon to run for Tainan mayor and win. Conversely, the DPP could run a living saint for mayor in Taipei and still lose. In 2022, the DPP ran with the closest thing to a living saint they could find: former Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中). During the pandemic, his polling was astronomically high, with the approval of his performance reaching as high as 91 percent in one TVBS poll. He was such a phenomenon that people printed out pop-up cartoon
The town of Jhihben (知本) in Taitung County is most well-known for its hot springs, but if you’re looking for an interesting nearby daytime excursion to complement an evening soak at your hotel, don’t miss the Jhihben National Forest Recreation Area (知本國家森林遊樂區). From the resort area, simply take Bus 8129 down to the last stop at the end of the main road and then walk across the bridge and turn left for the ticket gate. This bus can also be taken right from the Taitung Bus Station or from the Zhiben TR station, and runs approximately once an hour all day
RSS