How China Spreads Its Propaganda Version of Life for Uyghurs
Thousands of videos of Uyghurs denying abuses against their community are showing up on Twitter and YouTube. They’re part of an elaborate influence campaign by Chinese officials to counter reports of human rights violations in Xinjiang.
Recently, the owner of a small store in western China came across some remarks by Mike Pompeo, the former U.S. secretary of state. What he heard made him angry.
A worker in a textile company had the same reaction. So did a retiree in her 80s. And a taxi driver.
Pompeo had routinely accused China of committing human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region, and these four people made videos to express their outrage. They did so in oddly similar ways.
“Pompeo said that we Uyghurs are locked up and have no freedom,” the store owner said.
“There’s nothing like that at all in our Xinjiang,” said the taxi driver.
“We are very free,” the retiree said.
“We are very free now,” the store owner said.
“We are very, very free here,” the taxi driver said.
“Our lives are very happy and very free now,” the textile company worker said.
These and thousands of other videos are meant to look like unfiltered glimpses of life in Xinjiang, the western Chinese region where the Communist Party has carried out repressive policies against Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities.
His twitter feed has lately warned about foreign infiltration of the tech industry:
I discussed in my last tech tweet t.co/VxlUMZn2db how foreign agents using social engineering can be inserted into operating systems departments as software engineers.
Far more important is placing development managers into such departments. Here's how its done: pic.twitter.com/y84j6P8H2q
— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) June 9, 2021