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Female influencers from ethnic minority communities have become the new face of Chinese propaganda in response to criticism of its human rights abuses, according to an Australian think tank. in the title “Frontier influencers: The new face of Chinese propaganda‘, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute has raised concerns about the use of sophisticated content by Chinese minority female influencers from troubled border regions such as Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia, which the think tank dubs “border influencers” or “frontier accounts”, To seed the internet with disinformation and its preferred narrative.
China’s emerging practice of covering up its record of human rights abuses has largely caught the attention of U.S. social media platforms and Western policymakers, the report said.
The report argues that cutting-edge influencer content was initially deployed on domestic video-sharing platforms for China’s “internal publicity needs.” Later, YouTube was used to redirect content to a global audience as part of China’s evolving approach to criticism of human rights issues.
“YouTube is viewed by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) as a key battleground in its ideological struggle with the outside world, and its use in external propaganda work has intensified in recent years,” it said.
The less refined speeches by frontier influencers gave a more authentic feel, conveying a false sense of legitimacy and transparency in China’s frontier regions that state media struggled to achieve, the report said.
“To viewers, video content may appear to be the creation of individual influencers, but is actually called ‘professional user-generated content’ in China, or content produced with the help of a special influencer management agency called Duofang .- Channel Network (MCN).”
Despite the dangers of cutting-edge influencers so active on Western social media platforms such as YouTube, the report found they were carefully scrutinized and deemed “politically credible.”
“The content they create is subject to strict restrictions on self-censorship and surveillance through its MCN and domestic video platforms before being posted on YouTube,” the report added.
The think tank uses case studies to demonstrate how content from cutting-edge influencers is directly commissioned by the CCP.
The report also shows how a young female Uyghur influencer named Guli Abdushukur posted a video on her family’s lifestyle on her YouTube channel.Annie Guli‘ was released in April 2019 and has garnered 604,574 views as of August 29, 2022. Abdushukur’s video has garnered 154,000 subscribers on a platform that has been blocked in China since March 2009.
“Her claims were found to counter foreign media and government reports of human rights abuses in Xinjiang. In one of the videos, Abdushukur told foreign journalists participating in an online discussion that she would defend Xinjiang from foreign countries, according to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. Journalists’ false reports and show the beauty of her homeland.
China has been facing serious allegations of human rights abuses against Uighurs and other predominantly Muslim communities under the pretext of containing extremism. The UN Human Rights Office said in an assessment report released in August 2022 that serious human rights violations have occurred in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region against the backdrop of the government’s counter-terrorism and counter-“extremism” strategy.
“The extent to which arbitrary and discriminatory detention of Uyghurs and members of other major Muslim groups may constitute an international crime, in particular against humanity, in the context of the restriction and denial of fundamental rights enjoyed by individuals and groups more generally, under law and policy crime,” the assessment report said.
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