1 week Ago By Claudia Bennett
On X, one can find a verified Danny Haiphong (@SpiritofHo), allegedly a journalist, sharing his travels through the Uyghur region of China. His video posts show us a “grand bazaar in Urumqi” where “thousands of people are shopping, living their lives in a beautiful, beautiful place.” A place where genocide, as in the human rights violations that are taking place at the hands of the Chinese Communist Party.
But to hear Mr. Haiphong, the party lackey, tell it, these are only the abuses we’ve been told by “some Uyghur in the West somewhere.” The particularly blood-boiling part of his video was this, speaking of the bazaar jovially: “It’s a beautiful place.
” But it’s all produced by forced labor. And everyone has to go back to their camps after they have finished shopping. What more could you expect from someone who is clearly doing the bidding of the Chinese Communist Party? It’s a pity that more than 140,000 followers are listening to his garbage.
But this is among dictators’ favorite moves: using influencers and tourists to lie for them. It’s known that the Chinese Communist Party orchestrates visits to the Uyghur region to conceal the harsh realities of forced family separations, arbitrary detentions of millions in concentration or forced labor camps and thousands of Uyghurs living in exile and forcibly rendered stateless. Influencers, tourists and journalists parade around the region on tours, but they are not shown the whole truth.
This is a tactic dictators love. Influencers and “social media journalists” have visited such regions in China, Afghanistan, Iran, Cuba and Syria, to name a few. They have whitewashed the human rights abuses and presented these areas as open to tourism.
Of course, the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t want to show the world the camps it so repeatedly denies exist, though anyone with internet access can find them. In August 2020, BuzzFeed News used satellite analysis to show the full apparatus of Beijing’s repression: There are nearly 400 high-security concentration camps for the nearly 2 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs and other Turkic-Muslim ethnic groups in the Uyghur region. It’s a pretty clever tactic if it weren’t so appalling: Torture and imprison millions of people and hire influencers and other social media personalities to do the lie of a “beautiful, beautiful place.
” It’s not just the Chinese Communist Party, either. Earlier last week, Somali influencer Marian Abdi posted a photo with a member of Afghanistan’s Taliban. If you don’t know much about the Taliban, in a nutshell, they have oppressed and continue to oppress women.
Recently, it prohibited women from speaking or showing their faces outside their homes. So it’s extra rich that Ms. Abdi, a solo female traveler, said visiting the war-torn country was a dream come true.
Doing Iran’s bidding earlier this year was American porn actress Whitney Wright, who posted numerous selfies in front of the old U.S. Embassy while in a hijab, with more than a few strands of her hair showing.
If she were Iranian, improperly wearing a hijab would be illegal. She likely would have ended up in detention, and perhaps even dead, like Mahsa Amini in September 2022. Influencers are the dictator’s modern propaganda.
Whether these influencers know it or are willing to admit it, they are being used as tools to convince the world that the human rights abuses of the world’s most devious tyrants aren’t that bad. An Instagram picture isn’t worth the lives of those living under authoritarian regimes. Copyright © 2024 The Washington Times, LLC.
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