July 27, 2021
YouTube Suspensions of Site for Persecuted Minorities in China Is Human Rights Issue
Serikzhan Bilash founded the Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights organization in 2017 to be a voice for the voiceless. He started the YouTube channel so that people could share their experiences of persecution and draw attention to family members caught in the vast web of internment camps in Xinjiang, China. Now, the very platform that once gave them
a voice and an audience attempted to silence them.
On June 15, Bilash’s access to his YouTube account was temporarily suspended, initially without explanation. The account has more than 11,000 videos, mostly testimonials of family members of persons currently detained inside the more than 260 known political reeducation camps that currently hold between 1.8 million to 3 million ethnic Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and predominantly Uighurs, a Muslim minority in China.
YouTube has since clarified that it revoked access to the account due to the channel’s use of personally identifiable information, which violates its community standards. Heritage Senior Policy Analyst Olivia Enos and Heritage Research Fellow Kara Frederick write <[link removed]> that while YouTube’s reasoning for not permitting the use of personally
identifiable information in videos may be justified in preventing bullying in one circumstance, it may prevent good record-keeping and awareness of human rights violations in another.
Bilash includes personally identifiable information in the videos to verify the identities of the individuals providing testimony and their detained family members. Those who gave testimony willingly provided their personally identifiable information for the sake of their families. By providing this information, Bilash thinks that it strengthens the veracity of their claims and makes it difficult for authorities in China to label the videos as propaganda or false information. YouTube also serves as an important archive of the videos (according to Bilash, it’s the only complete archive), since they have been targets of the Kazakh
government and other authorities due to the sensitive nature of their advocacy.
Bilash’s first instinct upon hearing of his YouTube account’s suspension was fear that the majority of his work had been lost due to a misapplication of policy. While YouTube has since reinstated Bilash’s access to his account and has made efforts to scrub personally identifiable information from the videos already posted, Bilash is fearful that this won’t be the last time it will be targeted. And he’s likely not wrong. The mass gaming of community guidelines to target political enemies on social media is here to stay. Indeed, it’s already commonplace.
Bad actors working together to wage war against a third party using a tech company’s own policies adds a new element to the cat-and-mouse game of content moderation. Unlike more straightforward cases, such as Zoom executive Xinjiang Jin’s direct work with Chinese Communist Party officials to pull down and stymie Zoom calls on Tiananmen Square and other topics “unacceptable” to the party, new efforts trade on obfuscation.
While some protestations may be organic, platforms will increasingly contend with bad actors that manipulate their vague and inconsistently enforced set of rules to restrict free speech. Companies must be agile enough to contend with this type of crowdsourced manipulation without sacrificing consistent and transparent enforcement of community guidelines. Platforms should recognize and acknowledge that bad actors actively abuse their rules to silence their perceived enemies. They much create rule sets to aggressively counter such bad actors as closely as they scrutinize mainstream conservative speech.
Diversification is the immediate path forward. Short of convincing the major platforms that content moderation is a human rights issue, the best option to stave off permanent deletion is to use an alternative service provider that endorses and defends the freedom of expression.
Related: Click here <[link removed]> to read the Heritage Foundation's 2021 China Transparency Report.
July 27, 2021 @ 12:00 pm EDT - VIRTUAL: Scaling Up the U.S. Response to the Coup in Burma <[link removed]>
It has been nearly six months since the military coup in Burma, also known as Myanmar. Conditions inside the country continue to worsen with over 5,000 people currently detained and nearly 1,000 killed. Civil liberties and freedoms are evaporating as the military consolidates power. While the initial U.S. response to the coup was swift, there is much left to be done. There is strong bipartisan agreement on the need to ramp up U.S. sanctions, issue an atrocity determination, and ensure adequate humanitarian assistance. Join us <[link removed]> for a discussion with Women's Peace Network Founder and Director Wai Wai Nu, Burma activist Mike Mitchell, Human Rights Watch Asia Advocacy Director John Sifton, and EarthRights International General Counsel
Marco Simons on concrete actions to support the will of the Burmese people and to hold the military accountable.
July 14, 2021 @ 1:00 pm EDT - VIRTUAL: Pushing Boundaries: China's Aggressive New Tactics in South Asia <[link removed]>
In 2020, the deadliest crisis at the China-India border in four decades claimed dozens of lives and sharpened the rivalry between the world’s two most populous nations. Later that year, reports revealed that China had constructed a new village inside the nation of Bhutan, with more villages said to be planned on Bhutanese soil. This comes only three years after Chinese road construction near the disputed China-India-Bhutan border sparked yet another unprecedented crisis between Indian and Chinese soldiers. What explains these aggressive new tactics and China’s sudden appetite for risk along its southwestern border? Join us <[link removed]> for a discussion with Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Associate
Fellow Darshana Baruah and Johns Hopkins SAIS Senior Research Professor and Academic Director Daniel Markey, Ph.D. on these incidents and their implications for U.S. policy in the Indo-Pacific.
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