China spreading propaganda videos of Uyghurs living "happily" on YouTube

Propaganda videos showing how happily Uyghurs are living under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party are repeatedly being shared using fake accounts on YouTube.

Propaganda videos showing how happily Uyghurs are living under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are repeatedly being shared using fake accounts on YouTube. However, the way the ethnic community has been surviving in China is quite contrary to what the recent videos are all about.

Soon after the July 5 riots that broke out within Urumqi in 2009 between the Han community and the Uyghurs, China decided to gradually eradicate the very existence of the group, which had already become an ethnic minority in their own land, by bringing into existence a string of policies to downgrade their ease of living, including serious human rights violations such as forced labour and forced sterilisation.

Quite identical to what followed after the Tibetan unrest of 2008, detention centres were built on a massive scale for Uyghurs, which were yet again termed “voluntary re-education camps”. The sole aim of the camp, as referred to by the CCP, is to forestall any extremist behaviour within the ethnic group.

Also Read: China may have committed crimes against humanity in Uyghur Muslim territory: UN report

The things that constitute a hint of possible radical behaviour could include just anything from not shaving your beard to not using a phone for a considerably longer time period; examples of which have already been revealed publicly by an anonymous individual through a leaked database consisting of several photographs of detainees stuck within the detention centres without any sensible reason.

In order to turn the masses on one's side, the utmost thing necessary is to control the flow of information and manipulate it that’s basically how a communist regime like that in China thrives. With changing times, individuals and entities across the world have started exploiting the interactive nature of the internet, which is what “participatory propaganda” is in simpler terms.

As for the Uyghurs, the CCP came up with two different strategies: each for within and outside China. The strategy is to demean Uyghurs within whilst veneering their situation on western platforms so as to baffle the rest of the world and further distort the available data on what’s actually going on in Xinjiang.