Thread by @Nrg8000

The last few days have seen a few people try to discredit our report of 380+ detention facilities in Xinjiang by finding one they don't agree with, this THREAD will collect my threads debunking each and every one of these 'debunks'. If you find more thow them my way.

This site was referred to by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs to call our claims completely false. Of course, they're wrong.

https://twitter.com/Nrg8000/status/1306925356826259456

Here's a thread claiming that a camp is actually a school with video footage to prove it, but the video footage isn't shot within 5km of the camp.

https://twitter.com/Nrg8000/status/1309852344792743939

Here's another debunk of a claim that is apparently going around privately to people interested in China to discredit our whole dataset.

https://twitter.com/Nrg8000/status/1309863265472716800

I'm only going to address these sorts of debunkings once, because they're simply to do with the fact that if you look at satellite imagery from 2013, you won't see things built in 2017. When you look at newer satellite imagery suddenly they appear.

https://twitter.com/Nrg8000/status/1309867930746724357

Another one, it actually was a middle school in Nilqa, an activist group visited it and confirmed it, plus satellite imagery from the time shows pervasive internal fencing and channels to move detainees.
bitterwinter.org/school-convert…
@MyUKnumber4

Another one, the coordinates are wrong again. Maybe to do with the fact that coordinates dont easily translate into Google's China data (it's illegal to have accurate map data for China so they need to offset it).
@zhangxin9261

An Australian academic tried to find holes in our camps dataset. It boiled down to the fact that buildings used for other things were turned into camps in 2017/18.
(we also have evidence of retirement homes, schools, disease centers, hospitals and more)

https://twitter.com/Nrg8000/status/1310064859803824128

Seeing a point on Baidu Maps and going hoitytoity these warmongers must be wrong, without doing literally any research (which seems to be a common thread) is the exact same energy as going wewwww the three gorges dam looks weird on google earth it must be about to collapse.

To illustrate some of the differences between schools and camps, see these three photos of a school in Peyziwat, from before (2016), after (2017) and annotated. This is basically the lowest security that detention facilities come, yet the ubiquitous security is clear.