Transparency Center

Report March 2025

Submitted

Commitment 30

Relevant Signatories commit to establish a framework for transparent, structured, open, financially sustainable, and non-discriminatory cooperation between them and the EU fact-checking community regarding resources and support made available to fact-checkers.

We signed up to the following measures of this commitment

Measure 30.1 Measure 30.2 Measure 30.3 Measure 30.4

In line with this commitment, did you deploy new implementation measures (e.g. changes to your terms of service, new tools, new policies, etc)?

Yes

If yes, list these implementation measures here

Bing entered agreements with independent organizations to improve language coverage across EEA Member States and languages.

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?

If yes, which further implementation measures do you plan to put in place in the next 6 months?

Not applicable

Measure 30.1

Relevant Signatories will set up agreements between them and independent fact-checking organisations (as defined in whereas (e)) to achieve fact-checking coverage in all Member States. These agreements should meet high ethical and professional standards and be based on transparent, open, consistent and non-discriminatory conditions and will ensure the independence of fact-checkers.

QRE 30.1.1

Relevant Signatories will report on and explain the nature of their agreements with fact-checking organisations; their expected results; relevant quantitative information (for instance: contents fact-checked, increased coverage, changes in integration of fact-checking as depends on the agreements and to be further discussed within the Task-force); and such as relevant common standards and conditions for these agreements.

Bing Search supports the schema.org ClaimReview fact-check protocol as part of its search ingestion, as discussed further in QRE 21.1.1.

In addition to organic fact checks and fact check content leveraging ClaimReview tags that may surface in search results, articles from news and fact checking organizations may appear as part of specialized Bing Answers. In addition, news and fact-check articles can appear in Bing News carousels, which are often presented at the top of search results pages, depending on the nature of the user query. Microsoft maintains agreements with news publishers to surface high authority content, including articles from well-regarded fact checking organizations and journalist-driven fact-checks, high in relevant search results.

QRE 30.1.2

Relevant Signatories will list the fact-checking organisations they have agreements with (unless a fact-checking organisation opposes such disclosure on the basis of a reasonable fear of retribution or violence).

See QRE 30.1.1 and QRE 21.1.1. The trusted third-party partners Bing search leverages provide coverage in several EU languages, such as 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, contracted fact-checking data also includes coverage of Catalan and Serbian languages.

QRE 30.1.3

Relevant Signatories will report on resources allocated where relevant in each of their services to achieve fact-checking coverage in each Member State and to support fact-checking organisations' work to combat Disinformation online at the Member State level.

See QREs 30.1.1-2.

As noted above, any authorized fact-checking organization can leverage the ClaimReview protocol to provide fact-checks to Bing Search. Bing Search would welcome additional usage of the ClaimReview protocols in EU Member States and actively partners with third party partners including, news organizations, fact checking organizations and nonprofits in the EU to inform defensive search interventions, threat intelligence, and issue monitoring. Bing has dedicated internal teams that leverage this information to inform product mitigations and defensive search interventions.

SLI 30.1.1

Relevant Signatories will report on Member States and languages covered by agreements with the fact-checking organisations, including the total number of agreements with fact-checking organisations, per language and, where relevant, per service.

As described in QRE 30.1.1, Microsoft has a number of news agreements that include journalism, news, and fact checking coverage and provide remuneration to fact checkers and news organizations for news that is surfaced on Bing. These agreements, the nature of which are confidential, cover a range of languages and markets, including EEA member states. While certain agreements include fact checking coverage, because these arrangements are not strictly for fact-checking services, we do not reflect these agreements in this SLI.

In addition, as set out in QRE 30.1.2 and SLI 31.1.1, any fact-checking organisation can leverage the ClaimReview protocol to embed fact-check tags into their website (thereby adding fact-check tags or flags into indexed results) and there is no limitation in terms of languages and Member States covered. Because ClaimReview is an open protocol available for all websites and search engines to use, Bing does not have agreements with individual fact-checking organisations to tag articles in Claim Review.