Female influencers from ethnic minority communities have become the new face of Chinese propaganda to counter criticisms of its human rights abuses, according to an Australia-based think tank. In the report titled ‘Frontier influencers: the new face of China’s propaganda’, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute has raised concerns over the use of sophisticated content by female China-based ethnic-minority influencers from the troubled frontier regions of Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia, which the think tank refers as ‘frontier influencers’ or ‘frontier accounts’, to promote disinformation and seed the internet with its preferred narratives.
This emerging approach by China to obfuscate its record of human rights violations is largely flying under the radar of US social media platforms and western policymakers, according to the report.
The report suggests that the frontier-influencer content is originally deployed on domestic video-sharing platforms for China’s “internal propaganda need”. Later, YouTube is used to redirect the content toward global audiences as part of the CCP’s evolving approach to counter criticisms of human rights problems.
“YouTube is seen by the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) as a key battlefield in its ideological contestation with the outside world, and YouTube’s use in foreign-facing propaganda efforts has intensified in recent years,” it said.
The less polished presentation by the frontier influencers has a more authentic feel that conveys a false sense of legitimacy and transparency about China’s frontier regions that state media struggle to achieve, according to the report.
“For viewers, the video content appears to be the creation of the individual influencers, but is in fact what’s referred to in China as ‘professional user generated content’, or content that’s produced with the help of special influencer-management agencies known as multi-channel networks (MCNs).”
While such active presence of frontier influencers on Western social media platforms like YouTube is fraught with danger, the report found that they are carefully vetted and considered “politically reliable.”
“The content they create is tightly circumscribed via self-censorship and oversight from their MCNs and domestic video platforms before being published on YouTube,” the report added.
The think tank used a case study to show how frontier influencers’ content was directly commissioned by the CCP.
The report also showed how a young female Uyghur influencer named Guli Abdushukur posted a video about her family’s lifestyle on her YouTube channel ‘Annie Guli’ in April 2019 and garnered 604,574 views as of August 29, 2022. Abdushukur’s videos have garnered 154,000 subscribers on a platform that’s been blocked in China since March 2009.
‘Her account was found to be aimed at pushing back on reports of human rights abuses in Xinjiang from foreign media and governments. In one of the videos, Abdushukur is telling the foreign journalists attending the online discussion that she’ll defend Xinjiang from the untrue reports of foreign journalists and showcases the beauty of her homeland, reported the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
China has been facing serious allegations of committing human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim communities on the pretext of checking extremism. In an assessment report released in August 2022, the UN Human Rights Office said that serious human rights violations have been committed in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous region in the context of the government’s application of counter-terrorism and counter-“extremism” strategies.
“The extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of members of Uyghur and other predominantly Muslim groups, pursuant to law and policy, in context of restrictions and deprivation more generally of fundamental rights enjoyed individually and collectively, may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity,” the assessment report said.
