August 19 2019, 2:28 p.m.
TWITTER HELPED TO promote
Chinese government propaganda and disinformation about the country’s
controversial internment camps in the Xinjiang region, a review of the
company’s advertising records reveals.
The social media company
today announced a
policy change that would bar such promotion following an inquiry from The
Intercept and an earlier controversy over similar propaganda related to
demonstrations in Hong Kong.
In Xinjiang, a western
province in China, the United Nations has estimated that 1 million ethnic
minority Muslim Uighurs — including children, pregnant women, elderly people,
and people with disabilities — have been detained under the pretext of fighting
extremism. According to Human Rights Watch, Chinese authorities are “committing
human rights abuses in Xinjiang on a scale unseen in the country in decades.”
A review of Twitter
advertisements from between June and August this year showed that the social
media giant promoted more than 50 English-language tweets from the Global
Times, a Chinese state media organization. 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 Global Times paid Twitter
to promote its tweets to a portion of the more than 300 million active users on
the social media platform. The tweets appeared in users’ timelines, regardless
of whether they followed the Global Times account. In July, amid global
condemnation of the treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang, Twitter began promoting
several Global Times tweets about the region.
One of the promoted tweets,
from July 11,
included an embedded video in which the Global Times’ editor-in-chief claimed
that people who refer to the facilities in Xinjiang as “mass detention camps”
have “smeared the vocational education and training centers established to help
people avoid extremism.” He went on to attack “European politicians and media
workers,” who he claimed had “tried to defend terrorist activities in
Xinjiang,” adding, “their hands are in a way soiled with the blood of the
Chinese people who died in violent attacks.”
Another promoted tweet,
from July 4,
included a video purportedly taken in Xinjiang, in which people are seen
shopping in the street and eating in restaurants to a soundtrack of piano
music. The video describes riots in 2009 that occurred in Urumqi, the capital
of Xinjiang, and states that residents there “now live a happy and peaceful
life” because they work together to fight terrorism and extremism. There is no
mention in the video of the mass detention camps.
Other Global Times ads
promoted by Twitter follow a similar theme, presenting the region as a happy
and peaceful place where no human rights abuses have occurred. One promoted
tweet includes video of an elderly woman receiving a package of
medical supplies from government officials before breaking down in tears of
joy. The tweet claims that poverty has been alleviated in the area because
local residents have “access to high-quality medical care and affordable
medicines.”
Patrick Poon, China researcher
for Amnesty International, said he found Twitter’s promotion of the
advertisements to be “appalling.”
“This is a very important,
serious issue that Twitter needs to address,” said Poon. “Twitter is helping to
promote false allegations and government propaganda. Allowing such advertising
sets an alarming precedent.”
On Monday, Twitter said that
it would no longer accept advertising from state-controlled media, in order to
“protect healthy discourse and open conversation.”
The announcement was published three
hours after The Intercept had contacted the company for comment on its promotion
of the Global Times’ Xinjiang tweets. Earlier on Monday, TechCrunch highlighted
Twitter’s promotion of
tweets from a different state news entity, China Xinhua News, which portrayed
largely peaceful pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong as violent.
Twitter’s promotion of Chinese
government propaganda had appeared to contradict its own policies, which state
that advertising on the platform must be “honest.” The advertisements also
undermined statements from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who told the Senate
Intelligence Committee last year that the company was working to combat
“propaganda through bots and human coordination [and] misinformation
campaigns.”
Like many Western technology
companies, Twitter has a complex relationship with China. The social media
platform is blocked in the country and cannot be accessed there without the use
of censorship circumvention technologies, such as a virtual private network or
proxy service. At the same time, however, Twitter generates a lot of
advertising revenue in China and has a growing presence in the country.
In July, Twitter’s director in
China reportedly
stated that the company’s team there had tripled in the last year and
was the company’s fastest growing division. In May, the social media giant held
a “Twitter for Marketers” conference in Beijing. Meanwhile, Twitter was criticized for
purging Chinese dissidents’ accounts on the platform – which it claimed was a
mistake – and has also been the subject of a protest campaign, launched by the
Chinese artist Badiucao, after it refused to
publish a “hashflag” symbol to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the
Tiananmen Square massacre.
Poon, the Amnesty researcher,
said police in China have in recent months increasingly targeted human rights
advocates in the country who are active on Twitter, forcing them to delete
their accounts or remove specific posts that are critical of the government.
These cases have been reported to Twitter, according to Poon, but the company
has not taken any action.
“Twitter has allowed the
Chinese government to advertise its propaganda while turning a deaf ear on
those who have been persecuted by the Chinese regime,” Poon said. “We need to
hear how Twitter can justify that.”
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