TikTok owner, Huawei helping China's crackdown on Uighur Muslims: Report

The surveillance technologies of Chinese tech giants, including Huawei technologies and ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company), are being used by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the Uyghur and other minority populations in Xinjiang, according to a report. Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), in its report Mapping more of China's tech giants: AI and surveillance, said that China’s surveillance state is not limited to Xinjiang since the Ministry of Public Security, through its two government plans, aim to comprehensively surveil China’s whole population by 2020 through a video camera network using facial recognition technology. 

“We have found that TikTok’s parent company ByteDance—which is not on the US entity list for human rights violations in Xinjiang—collaborates with public security bureaus across China, including in Xinjiang where it plays an active role in disseminating the party-state’s propaganda on Xinjiang,” the report read.

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TikTok Controversy

TikTok recently issued an apology for taking down a video from its platform where a girl condemned China’s crackdown on Uighur Muslims. TikTok said that it was ‘human moderation error’ and the video was restored within an hour. A 17-year-old American girl named Feroza Aziz uploaded a video on the social media platform where she said, “Use your phone that you are using right now to search up what is happening in China. How they are getting concentration camps, by throwing innocent Muslims in there”.

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Recent leaks from the Chinese government drew global attention which revealed China’s crackdown on Uighur Muslims using artificial intelligence to monitor these communities in China and abroad. According to the leaked classified documents, known as China Cables, China has deployed Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP) to collect personal information on citizens and create a lengthy list of “suspicious” people based on this data. The documents described the detention camps holding over a million Uighur Muslims and the operations manual with guidelines to manage to the camps.

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