Hong Kong: Mistakenly playing a protest song instead of China’s national anthem for the city’s athletes at recent international sporting events has upset Hong Kong officials.

Google has a “moral obligation” to stop a democracy protest song from appearing in search results, Hong Kong’s leader remarked as the row over China’s national anthem widened to include the tech giant. Their anger has increasingly focused on Google after it found that when people search for Hong Kong’s anthem, the protest song “Glory to Hong Kong” frequently comes at the top of the page.

Mr. John Lee, the city leader, told reporters that Google ought to make sure that the national anthem of China, in which the city’s athletes compete, appears at the top of the search results page. “If any company is in any way responsible, it has that moral obligation,” the city leader observed. “There are ways to do it,” Mr. Lee added.

According to Mr. Tang, a former police chief, Google observed its search engine results were governed by an algorithm, not human input. Both Mr. Tang and Mr. Lee disagreed, arguing that Google was ready to change search results to comply with regional legislation, such as privacy laws in the European Union.

Google has not yet responded to requests for comment. The national anthem “March of the Volunteers,” which was inspired by the Communist Party’s fight to free China from Japanese rule, is China’s national anthem. The song “Glory to Hong Kong” was written after the widespread protests that arose in Hong Kong in 2019 and quickly gained enormous popularity there.

According to the statement, it is now all but illegal to sing the song or play its melody under a sweeping national security law that was imposed to crush those protests.

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