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China would have paid for advertisements on Facebook and Twitter, while these two platforms remain blocked in the country, to spread false information about internment camps of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. This is what investigations published earlier this week by The Intercept and BuzzFeed News and relayed by American media Vox revealed.
Indeed, BuzzFeed News revealed that Chinese state media would have posted Facebook ads designed to challenge the alleged human rights violations during the massive imprisonment of Muslim minorities by the government in the Xinjiang region, in the northwest of the country.
The platform would have spotted three ads (two active and an idle one) in Facebook's advertising library, extolling the alleged successes of detainees in the camps and saying that detention centers were not supposed to interfere with religious beliefs and practices. According to the same source, active ones would have been placed in recent days and would be aimed at an audience in the United States as well as in other countries.
For its part, The Intercept focused its attention more on Twitter, where more than 50 tweets in English from the Global Times, a Chinese state media organization, would have been promoted on the social network. «Several of the tweets deliberately obscure the truth about the situation in Xinjiang and attack critics of the country’s ruling Communist Party regime», the media said.
Vox pointed out that Twitter took, Monday, a stance by updating its advertising policies and announcing that it would refuse Chinese-controlled media commercials. Facebook, for its part, said it would continue to accept such ads but promises to look closely at the ads to determine if they break its rules.
In Xinjiang, the United Nations estimated that one million members of the Uighur ethnic minority have been arrested under the pretext of fighting extremism. According to Human Rights Watch, the Chinese authorities «are committing human rights violations in Xinjiang of unprecedented scale in the country for decades».
