Bing, Microsoft’s own search engine, has been found to be more prudish than national governments in censoring sensitive materials with sexual contents.

The Open Net Initiative said Friday that it ran a test of Bing with a version customized for Arab countries. In the test, ONI found that Bing filtered words in English and Arabic that are related to sex as well as LGBT contents.

When the filtered keywords are searched, the search engine will display the message “Your country or region requires a strict Bing SafeSearch setting, which filters out results that might return adult content.”

ONI reported that Bing’s censorship is quite odd considering that although countries in the Middle East mostly exercise political censorship, not all countries filter contents related to sex and homosexuality.

ONI suggests that filtering should be done country-based or better yet, as preferred by online users to become parallel with freedom of speech that Microsoft professes to protect.

The report by ONI noted that users can be able to get around the filters by using versions of Bing for other countries because the search engine does not impose search settings based on IP addresses.