In 2022, Bing deindexed sites authored by autistic people and replaced autism-related results for terms the autistic community often uses with misinformation and ABA sites.
On August 4, 2022, I went searching on Bing out of curiosity. My site often displayed in the results, and I wanted to see how it might display for a post I wrote.
That’s when I discovered my site was no longer displaying on Bing. I couldn’t even search for my [old] domain.
I saw no other autistic bloggers’ sites in the results — and I couldn’t search for them, either!
Searching for autistic community terms
Searching “autistic” pulled up a result that says to “seek medical attention immediately” for ASD symptoms.
That was new…
“Childhood autism” is grossly inaccurate.
It got worse, though.
The information card painted autistic children as burdens and recommended parents consult a specialist before the earliest stages of pregnancy.
Why?!
Google’s autism-related search results had never been so awful.
I scrolled down to their frequently asked questions drop-downs to see if it could possibly get any better…
Further digging
At the expense of my mental health, I dug deeper into Bing’s results by playing with the algorithm (testing different queries) and analyzing results.
Autistic representation in Bing Search results
The autistic hard-hitters in the blogosphere were still on Bing, but some older autistic bloggers autistic bloggers had either
- lost their ranking and are now past page 4 OR
- have been removed entirely.
The ones that remained in the Bing search results did NOT have “autism” or “autistic” in their site name.
I had “autistic” in my blog name back then, so obviously my site received the boot.
Bing algorithm exploit
Back then, Bing’s algorithm allowed Big Competitors to have your site deindexed…which explained why Bing started ranking Autism Speaks, ABA supporters and other harmful autism organizations above the actually autistic people still indexed.
Because, you know, autistic people sharing their stories are a major threat to anti-autism organizations and the ABA cult. 🙄
I have no idea if this exploit still exists in 2025. 👀
Prioritizing non-autistic & anti-autism resources
Autism Speaks was THE top site for nearly every single autism-related search query.
Most results and snippets featured non-autistic narratives, especially non-autistic parents of autistic children in relation to the burden of raising autistic kids.
What in the inspiration porn…
The bloggers who used “autistic” or “autism” in their site title or description were not indexed unless they fit into both the autism and autistic communities (i.e. if they use both identity-first and person-first language) OR old terms (i.e. “aspie” or “asperger’s”).
Even if this was a fluke, it was a BIG fluke.
Bing doesn’t matter that much on its own, but it’s used to power DuckDuckGo and Yahoo! Search — so a lot of harm could be done from this.
Not to mention the harm done to actually autistic people when our content doesn’t show up in search results!
Same doctor verifying other results
The results for “dissociative identity disorder” (DID) and similar terms were also different, and not in the good way.
Why did the same doc verify these? He doesn’t even support the neurodiversity movement. When I search for Dr. Abhimanyu Chandak, I find nothing about autism related to him.
The “ask a doctor” answers gave “tell me u know nothing about DID w/o telling me” vibes.
Family members cannot tell when a person switches. Each alter is not necessarily distinctive. It’s actually rare for that to happen.
Also, Bing’s verifying doctor implied it could be cured. 🤦♀️
Spreading autism misinformation
I decided to entertain my trauma and look at the “Causes” tab on the Bing Search results for autistic.
…I wish I hadn’t.
Aggression is NOT a sign of autism at all. It’s a result of frustration.
Autistic search results should be displayed for autistic search terms.
I glanced at the Overview…
And wish I had closed my browser tab altogether.
Studies prove autistic differences are not impairments, but part of the double empathy problem.
Bing’s response
I contacted Bing Technical Support about the results.
Hi,
Thank you for contacting Bing Technical Support regarding your concern with terms provided in Bing search results.
The information in our index is discovered through an organic crawling process. A complex software algorithm determines how to present the results. These processes work best when we avoid manual manipulation of the data and instead let our software do the work. While this may occasionally produce non-relevant results, our system will adjust itself over time to remove irrelevant search term associations.
For more information, please visit “How Bing delivers search results”: [link]
Thanks,
Bing Technical Support
Basically a statement of “the algorithm is ableist, and we don’t care to fix it 🤷♀️”.
A day later, the results were altered for the autistic search query, yet no autistic site owner or creator appeared first in results.
Blogs that used to appear in Bing search results, including mine, were still not searchable on Bing. When I searched for my blog, it gave me a “no results found” found.
How do you pretend an entire AREA of the internet doesn’t exist?!
Prioritizing ABA resources over autistic advocacy ones
Bing also allowed ABA ads to display before actual autistic advocacy resources, like the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network.
For autistic self-advocacy, there were ABA ads further down the results. Two ABA ads displayed on “autism ABA bad” BEFORE a post by an actually autistic post.
Felt like proof Bing accepts payment for algorithm corruption — which is funny, because they said they couldn’t influence it manually. 🤔
Also in the results for autism is bad, Microsoft Bing only showed ONE result by an autistic person (Autistic Science Person). There are THOUSANDS of posts by autistic people about how ABA is harmful/abusive/etc.
My thoughts on the fiasco
This was originally posted to my Twitter account August 4-6, 2022. My original posts received enough attention by other autistic people that someone mentioned someone who worked at Microsoft, and the results changed somewhat.
However, a quick search at the same terms today, January 2025, tells me that Microsoft and Bing still prioritize non-autistic experiences, stories and voices over those of autistic people.
Microsoft and Autism Speaks have worked together as partners, so I’m guessing this is a result of wanting to keep a notoriously anti-autism organization happy.
I don’t know. I don’t particularly care. They don’t care, either (obviously).
I’m sharing this post on my blog because these kinds of things need to be remembered. Name and shame companies, especially when they don’t improve and pretend like they do.
It’s 2025. The performative activism has got to go — clearly it’s not enough.
Something awesome that Google Search does that Bing does not is prioritize autistic experiences, stories and voices over non-autistic ones because the lived experience is perceived as “expertise” by the algorithm (this is part of E-E-A-T).
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