WASHINGTON - An American teenager, whose recent videos on the social media app TikTok have caused controversy, says she will continue her activism to raise awareness of the plight of Uighur Muslims in China despite Beijing’s efforts “to conceal the truth.”
Feroza Aziz, a 17-year-old from New Jersey, said her account on the Chinese-owned social network was suspended after she posted three videos in which she condemned China’s policy against the Uighurs. The videos, which were disguised as makeup tutorials, have received millions of views.
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17 yr old Feroza Aziz used Chinese platform TikTok to pretend to talk about eyelashes while raising awareness of China's treatment of Muslims in camps
Viewed by millions before she was banned, TikTok has now apologised & reinstated her account
“I posted my first video on Saturday and it was about the Uighurs being thrown into concentration camps,” Aziz told VOA Thursday in a phone interview.
“I woke up the next day to see that I got viral on the million views. Then I decided to post two more videos regarding the situation on Sunday night,” she said.
There are an estimated 13 million Uighurs and other Turkic Muslim minorities living in the Xinjiang region in northwest China.
The Chinese government has faced growing criticism from the international community over the detention of Uighurs and other Muslims in internment camps.
The U.S. government and human rights groups estimate 10% of the Uighur population is under detention.
Beijing defends the camps, calling them “vocational training centers.”
Aziz, whose parents are from Afghanistan, said, “I woke up Monday morning to see that my account was suspended and I thought that was really suspicious and strange that a Chinese-owned app suspending my account after talking about the Uighur situation.”
On Thursday, TikTok apologized to Aziz for removing her video, saying a “human moderation error” was behind the incident.
“We would like to apologize to the user for the error on our part,” Eric Han, the app’s U.S. head of safety, said.
“Due to a human moderation error, the viral video from Nov. 23 was removed. It’s important to clarify that nothing in our community guidelines precludes content such as this video, and it should not have been removed,” Han said in statement posted on a TikTok blog.
But activist Aziz, whose account was restored, said she didn’t think the popular video app’s apology was genuine.
“They know that what they did is wrong and they’re trying to cover it up,” she said.
She added that she would continue using TikTok and other social media platforms “to spread the word and raise awareness about the Uighur situation.”
Other activists in Xinjiang in recent months have posted edited videos of themselves on Douyin, China’s domestic version of TikTok, giving details about disappeared family members in internment camps.
To avoid online censorship and persecution by Chinese authorities, Uighur activists use the same technique: an old photo of someone placed in the background as the person appearing in the video cries or gestures instead of saying words.
However, many of those videos have since been deleted by Chinese censors, reported, adding the videos have been shared on other social media platforms. The fate of the activists in those videos remains unknown, according to Uighur sources following developments in Xinjiang.
Earlier this month, classified internal Chinese government documents were leaked. The documents included guidelines for operating detention camps in Xinjiang and instructions on how to use technology to target people.
The documents also reveal the Xinjiang camps are not for voluntary job training, as the Chinese government has been claiming.
On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the leaked documents “detail the Chinese party’s brutal detention and systematic repression of Uighurs and members of other Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang.”
These reports are consistent with an overwhelming and growing body of evidence that the Chinese Communist Party is committing human rights violations and abuses against individuals in mass detention, Pompeo said.
“We call on the Chinese government to immediately release all those who are arbitrarily detained and to end its draconian policies that have terrorized its own citizens in Xinjiang,” he said.
In its 2018 released earlier this month, the U.S. State Department said China’s primary counterterrorism focus remained on Uighurs.