Microsoft Bing

Report March 2025

Submitted
Commitment 21
Relevant Signatories commit to strengthen their efforts to better equip users to identify Disinformation. In particular, in order to enable users to navigate services in an informed way, Relevant Signatories commit to facilitate, across all Member States languages in which their services are provided, user access to tools for assessing the factual accuracy of sources through fact-checks from fact-checking organisations that have flagged potential Disinformation, as well as warning labels from other authoritative sources.
We signed up to the following measures of this commitment
Measure 21.1 Measure 21.2 Measure 21.3
In line with this commitment, did you deploy new implementation measures (e.g. changes to your terms of service, new tools, new policies, etc)?
No
If yes, list these implementation measures here
Not applicable 
Do you plan to put further implementation measures in place in the next 6 months to substantially improve the maturity of the implementation of this commitment?
Yes
If yes, which further implementation measures do you plan to put in place in the next 6 months?
Bing continues to evaluate additional tools and resources that support the spirit of this commitment.
Measure 21.1
Relevant Signatories will further develop and apply policies, features, or programs across Member States and EU languages to help users benefit from the context and insights provided by independent fact-checkers or authoritative sources, for instance by means of labels, such as labels indicating fact-checker ratings, notices to users who try to share or previously shared the rated content, information panels, or by acting upon content notified by fact-checkers that violate their policies.
QRE 21.1.1
Relevant Signatories will report on the policies, features, or programs they deploy to meet this Measure and on their availability across Member States.
Bing Search provides a range of features and tools to help users determine the reliability of content displayed in Bing search results. 

Since 2017, Bing Search has ingested content from the public ClaimReview protocol made available through Schema.org and displayed fact check tags within search results for websites that have incorporated ClaimReview tags.  ClaimReview functions as a tagging system that individual fact-checking organizations or media can use to identify their articles for search engines and social media platforms. Content tagged with a ClaimReview tag is “read” by Bing Search’s search engine crawlers when ingesting websites for their index and is used by Bing Search to help promote and/or highlight fact-checked content in search results. See additional information at Bing adds Fact Check label in SERP to support the ClaimReview markup | Webmaster Blog. Bing Search also utilizes ClaimReview and fact check data feeds from the from DataCommons.org. 

Fact-checks and articles from news and fact checking organizations may also appear as part of Bing Answers or similar features directed to users. In addition, news and fact-check articles can appear in Bing News verticals, which are often presented at the top of search results pages, depending on the user query.

In addition to the resources discussed above, Bing maintains an additional fact-checking agreement to provide coverage in the following EEA languages: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Spanish, and Swedish. In addition to the EU languages enumerated above, the fact-checking agreement also covers Catalan and Serbian languages, among others. 

Bing’s generative AI features are subject to robust safety classifiers (which are informed by data shared by information integrity partners and other authority signals) to prevent the creation of low authority materials or disinformation.  As Bing’s generative AI features prohibit the creation of misleading content, and Bing does not allow users to publish or share content created by the system on the platform, in-product fact checks are not relevant to Bing’s generative AI features. Moreover, generative responses are grounded in high authority web search results, and we provide links to websites so that users can learn more and evaluate the content for themselves.

For more information on other media literacy tools in Bing Search, please see QRE 17.1.1.

SLI 21.1.1
Relevant Signatories will report through meaningful metrics on actions taken under Measure 21.1, at the Member State level. At the minimum, the metrics will include: total impressions of fact-checks; ratio of impressions of fact-checks to original impressions of the fact-checked content–or if these are not pertinent to the implementation of fact-checking on their services, other equally pertinent metrics and an explanation of why those are more adequate.
Bing Search uses the open schema.org ClaimReview protocol, and fact check articles incorporating ClaimReview tags are ingested in the Bing index. Bing cannot feasibly assess the location of the website or its operator for the purposes of this metric. Therefore, when calculating the location of fact checked content for the purposes of SLI, Bing has compiled the data as follows: 

”FCURL” represents the number of distinct URLs containing a ClaimReview tag (i.e. fact-check content) that appeared on the first page of Bing search results for any number of users located in the EU Member States and EEA. 

“FCI” represents number of times the above-mentioned URLs appeared on the first page of Bing search results to a user located in EU Member States and the EEA. Bing cannot provide data on the ratio of impressions of fact-checks to original impressions of fact-checked content, as Bing ingests websites with “fact check” tags and thus there is no ratio to assess. Bing also cannot reasonably quantify the “reach” of labels or fact checks available on its search index beyond what is provided below, as the appearance of fact checks depends entirely on each user’s unique search query. 
Country Total impressions of fact-checks (FCI) No of labels/ fact-checkers and other authoritative sources (FCURLs)
Austria 34,509 4,698
Belgium 60,454 5,999
Bulgaria 2 2
Croatia 1 1
Cyprus 1 1
Czech Republic 1 1
Denmark 13,443 2,519
Estonia 1 1
Finland 9,591 1,629
France 212,276 9,081
Germany 3,968,924 17,342
Greece 1 1
Hungary 3 3
Ireland 38,151 5,806
Italy 68,653 5,939
Latvia 1 1
Lithuania 3 3
Luxembourg 1 1
Netherlands 9,292 97,193
Poland 59,184 4,690
Portugal 38,493 4,212
Romania 22 18
Slovakia 1 1
Spain 161,600 7,793
Sweden 39,686 5,756
Iceland 6 6
Liechtenstein 1 1
Norway 23942 4,456
Total EU 4,802,195 84,790
Total EEA 4,826,144 89,253
SLI 21.1.2
When cooperating with independent fact-checkers to label content on their services, Relevant Signatories will report on actions taken at the Member State level and their impact, via metrics, of: number of articles published by independent fact-checkers; number of labels applied to content, such as on the basis of such articles; meaningful metrics on the impact of actions taken under Measure 21.1.1 such as the impact of said measures on user interactions with, or user re-shares of, content fact-checked as false or misleading.
Metrics concerning “user interactions” and “labelling of content” are not applicable to Bing, as it is a search engine. Bing does not apply fact-check labels to websites; rather websites must embed a ClaimReview tag in order for Bing to ingest and display fact-check tags for a website within search results. Bing cannot quantify the number of articles published by independent fact-checkers that are available on the Bing Search index given the immense scale of search engine indexes. See SLI 21.1.1.