SW News: There are reports from rights organizations that Chinese officials and state media outlets are using social media to promote false information and influence public opinion to divert attention from the human rights violations in Xinjiang province.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is using technology to impose transnational digital repression, reported Portal Plus. The party has deployed sophisticated internet strategies to prevent disclosure of human rights violations such as arbitrary arrest, mass sterilization, and cultural degradation of Uyghur Muslims in the province of Xinjiang.

To tackle the criticism of human rights abuse, the CCP is coordinating its state propaganda apparatus, security agencies, and public relations industry to silence and shape Xinjiang narratives at home and abroad, rather than improving the conditions of Uyghurs and other Turkish minorities.

CCP’s covert campaigns seek to restrain international entities such as states, corporations, or individuals from making fact-based criticism of the party’s human rights violations in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.

State media and Chinese diplomats routinely take to social media to discredit and undermine researchers and journalists who publish influential reports about the atrocities committed against Muslims in Xinjiang and undercut the impact of their findings.

In 2017, China began to ramp up its crackdown on Uyghurs and other Turkic minorities in Xinjiang through abductions and arbitrary arrests, and detentions in “re-education” camps or prisons.

An estimated 1.8 million members of these groups have been held in the camps which witnessed widespread maltreatment, including torture, rape, forced sterilization and birth control, and forced labor.

Several credible reports and eyewitness testimony of the abuses have determined that the Chinese government’s actions in Xinjiang constitute genocide and a crime against humanity. The US and some Western Parliaments have heavily condemned Beijing for its actions.