China Used Twitter, Facebook More Than Ever Last Year for Xinjiang Propaganda

HONG KONG—The Chinese government’s action on Twitter and Fb above its procedures toward ethnic minorities in Xinjiang arrived at an all-time superior past calendar year, as Beijing sought to portray its approach, which includes use of prevalent internment camps and surveillance, as useful to the remote northwestern region.

The frequency of tweets about Xinjiang from Chinese state media and diplomatic Twitter accounts elevated to an average of nearly five hundred tweets for every month in 2020, up from about 280 for every month the prior calendar year, according to new analysis from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

On Fb, the group uncovered, general public pages operated by Chinese state media were being some of the most preferred sources for posts on Xinjiang.

Over the previous couple years, Chinese officials have dismissed stories by intercontinental journalists, firsthand accounts by previous detainees and their loved ones members, and federal government documents showing the internment and repression of generally Muslim ethnic minorities in Xinjiang as an effort and hard work to smear China.

As an alternative, the Chinese federal government has pushed an substitute tale: that the region’s large network of internment camps are vocational training centers, and that Uyghurs and other generally Muslim minorities there are satisfied citizens who can reside their lives freely.