India Today Impact | Pro-Chinese account posting Uyghur propaganda videos disappears
India Today
The YouTube account ‘Lok Chanbot’, which was posting Uyghur propaganda videos, disappeared after an India Today investigation on the same was published.
Out of a string of accounts sharing “happy” Uyghur propaganda videos, one prominent account that the India Today Open-Source Investigations (OSINT) team mentioned in its piece on pro-China accounts disseminating propaganda regarding Uyghurs on YouTube, has strangely disappeared soon after the piece was released online.
It is not yet clear if the user was removed by YouTube to counter disinformation or it was a voluntary action. These propaganda videos showed how happily Uyghurs were living under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime and were repeatedly shared using batch accounts on YouTube. Several independent reports suggest that the ethnic minority community has been facing mass human rights violations and suppression in China, quite contrary to what the propaganda videos portrayed.
The account also has a Medium page which it uses for publishing numerous pro-China articles including political caricatures, and also video links of its own YouTube channel which now have been made unavailable. Previous posts made by the same user appear to be promoting “One China” concept and defame Taiwan.
As visible in the screenshot, certain hashtags and phrases have been used in the case of Taiwan related pro-China campaigns too, much similar to how the Uyghur propaganda videos have been disseminated.
A search for the same hashtag on YouTube brought out results that follow the same pattern of a wide network of bogus looking accounts being used for sharing identical pro-China propaganda videos concerning Taiwan, including major events like Pelosi’s visit to the nation.
Rushan Abbas, the founder and executive director of the US based nonprofit organization, Campaign for Uyghurs also quoted the India Today story in a social media post and further advised the netizens to not fall for the narrative shared by the CCP.
