(Article by Alec Schemmel republished from NewsBusters.org)
Facebook has taken down disinformation networks tied to Iranian state-controlled media and removed accounts belonging to Russian state-controlled media. It has even removed media accounts not labeled state-controlled media albeit not very many purportedly linked to China’s government and to China-based hackers. But Facebook has given Chinese state-controlled media a pass to push propaganda no matter how outlandish the claims made in their posts.
Thirty-seven of the 40 Facebook accounts identified by the Media Research Center as belonging to Chinese state-controlled media have corresponding accounts on Twitter. There they were labeled “state-affiliated” media. The MRC identified only 23 out of the 40 accounts that Facebook labeled state-affiliated accounts on its platform a blatant violation of its policy on identifying accounts run by state-controlled media outlets.
Facebook has had no reservations about censoring conservative accounts. Yet, it allows accounts of state-controlled propaganda outlets from the genocidal regime of China to flourish. Forty accounts on Facebook, amassing over 751 million followers, are managed by Chinese state-controlled media outlets.
AFP
China’s portrayal of residents of its Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) enjoying religious freedom with public celebrations of the end of the holy Islamic month of Ramadan marks an effort to whitewash its harsh rights record in the region, the head of a Uyghur advocacy group said Thursday.
A report by China’s official
Global Times on Thursday said that Muslims throughout the country celebrated Eid al-Fitr, contradicting claims by Western governments and media outlets of state-backed human rights violations within their communities.
The report noted that Muslim residents of the XUAR enjoyed the Eid holiday by gathering with friends and family, eating traditional foods to break the Ramadan month of fasting and visiting deceased loved ones.
AFP
Lawmakers must act to cut U.S. ties to forced labor and expedite asylum for Uyghur refugees, and Washington should push the global community to end what it has designated a genocide in China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), witnesses told a Congressional hearing Thursday.
Speaking at a virtual hearing on “The Atrocities Against Uyghurs and Other Minorities in Xinjiang” at the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs, Nury Turkel, chairman of the board of the Washington-based Uyghur Human Rights Project (UHRP) advocacy group, denounced what he called a “lackluster international response” to ongoing rights abuses in the XUAR.
Reuters
The U.S. government should redesignate China as a “country of particular concern” (CPC) for violating the right to worship freely in its Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) and elsewhere, the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) said in an annual report Wednesday.
China was among 14 countries that USCIRF, a bipartisan and independent federal government body, recommended to the U.S. State Department in its 2021 Annual Report for designation as CPCs because their governments engage in or tolerate “systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations.” Of the 14, China was among 10 that the State Department designated as CPCs in December 2020.