A new research by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute has said that the Chinese government’s propaganda activity on Twitter and Facebook over its policies toward ethnic minorities in Xinjiang reached an all-time high in 2020, as Beijing sought to portray its approach, including use of widespread internment camps, as beneficial to the remote northwestern region.
According to the research, the frequency of tweets about Xinjiang from Chinese state media and diplomatic Twitter accounts increased to an average of nearly 500 tweets per month in 2020, up from about 280 per month in 2019.
“Since early 2020, there’s been a stark increase in the Chinese Government and state media’s use of US social media networks to push alternative narratives and disinformation about the situation in Xinjiang. Chinese state media accounts have been most successful in using Facebook to engage and reach an international audience,” read a key finding from the report.
It further said that the CCP is using tactics including leveraging US social media platforms to criticise and smear Uyghur victims, journalists and researchers who work on this topic, as well as their organisations.
“Chinese Government officials and state media are increasingly amplifying content, including disinformation, produced by fringe media and conspiracist websites that are often sympathetic to the narrative positioning of authoritarian regimes,” the report read.
“This amplifies the reach and influence of these sites in the Western media ecosystem. Senior officials from multilateral organisations, including the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations (UN), have also played a role in sharing such content,” it added.
According to the report, the Xinjiang Audio-Video Publishing House, a publishing organisation owned by a regional government bureau and affiliated with the CCP’s United Front Work Department, has funded a marketing company to create videos depicting Uyghurs as supportive of the Chinese Government’s policies in Xinjiang.
Those videos were then amplified on Twitter and YouTube by a network of inauthentic accounts.
“China’s approach to diplomatic and state media messaging has had to adapt in order to project power and influence in an open internet environment, where it has fewer levers to control information and shape opinion than it does over the Chinese internet,” according to the researchers who wrote in the report.
“Shock tactics, disinformation, the circulation of conspiracy theories and leveraging fringe media outlets and individuals when their narratives align are new tools in the CCP’s propaganda arsenal as it attempts to portray its control of Xinjiang positively in the face of credible, mounting evidence of human rights abuses and international criticism,” the report stated.
Across the world, China is facing severe criticism for cracking down on Uyghur Muslims by sending them to mass detention camps, interfering in their religious activities and sending members of the community to undergo some form of forcible re-education or indoctrination.
Beijing, on the other hand, has denied that it is engaged in human rights abuses against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang while reports from journalists, NGOs and former detainees have surfaced, highlighting the Chinese Communist Party’s brutal crackdown on the ethnic community, according to a report.