The Chinese government has denied all allegations of human rights abuse claims against them for their treatments of Uyghurs, a muslim ethnic minority living in Xinjiang.
Then, @jeffykao found thousands of propaganda videos like these on YouTube and Twitter👇
Then, @jeffykao found thousands of propaganda videos like these on YouTube and Twitter👇
2/ Note: The subtitles came with these videos. We did not add or modify them.
3/ More than 1,000 videos mention former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Pompeo, if you’ll recall, routinely accused China of committing human rights abuses while working for president Trump.
Pompeo, if you’ll recall, routinely accused China of committing human rights abuses while working for president Trump.
4/ “Pompeo said that we Uyghurs are locked up and have no freedom,” a store owner says.
“There’s nothing like that at all in our Xinjiang,” says a taxi driver. “We are very, very free here.”
“Our lives are very happy and very free now,” a textile worker says.
“There’s nothing like that at all in our Xinjiang,” says a taxi driver. “We are very, very free here.”
“Our lives are very happy and very free now,” a textile worker says.
5/ Key words and phrases are repeated across the videos. The expression hushuo-badao (胡说八道), meaning “complete nonsense” and close variations of it appear in more than *600* videos.
6/ Establishing that Chinese government officials had a hand in making these videos is sometimes just a matter of asking the people in them.
When reached by phone, the man in this clip said local propaganda authorities had produced the video.
When reached by phone, the man in this clip said local propaganda authorities had produced the video.
7/ (We reached out to the official he named, but never heard back from him).
8/ The clips are meant to look like real portraits of life in Xinjiang, a western Chinese region where the Communist Party has carried out repressive policies against Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities.
9/ The video campaign started this year after the State Department declared on Jan. 19 that China was committing genocide in Xinjiang.
10/ Many of these videos first appeared on a regional Communist Party news app. Then they showed up on YouTube and other global sites, with English subtitles added.
11/ On Twitter, a network of connected accounts like these shared the videos in ways that seemed designed to avoid the platform’s systems for detecting influence campaigns.
12/ These videos will probably be most people’s only glimpse into Xinjiang, a remote desert region closer to Kabul than to Beijing.
That’s what could make them effective propaganda.
That’s what could make them effective propaganda.
13/ This investigation took months and required analyzing more than 3,000 videos. Read the full story, co-published with @nytimes, here: propublica.org/article/how-ch…
14/ Sign up here to get stories like this one as soon as they publish: go.propublica.org/bigstory-social
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