TikTok apologises to Feroza Aziz after banning video criticising China over 'ethnic cleansing camps'

Tim Baker28 November 2019

TikTok has apologised to a user for removing a video that criticised the Chinese state’s treatment of minority Muslims.

In the video she posted last week, Feroza Aziz gave a tutorial on eyelash curling while talking about how Muslims were being treated, and saying she wanted to spread awareness of the situation.

The UN estimates that more than a million Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region in western China have incarcerated in camps in what has been branded “ethnic cleansing” by some. China claims the camps are for “education”.

On Twitter this week Ms Aziz said she had been blocked from posting on TikTok for a month, and on Wednesday posted that her viral video had been taken down, only to be restored later.

The video was offline for 50 minutes, TikTok said on its website.

The platform is also facing an inquiry by a US national security panel over its handling of personal data, while US lawmakers fear it may be censoring politically sensitive content.

"We would like to apologise to the user for the error on our part," said Eric Han, the app's US head of safety.

"Due to a human moderation error, the viral video from November 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."

The Artux City Vocational Skills Education Training Service Center in Artux in Xinjiang
AP

China's foreign ministry said it had no specifics of the case when queried by Reuters about the incident on Wednesday.

But it added that it required Chinese firms to operate in a way that respected international norms and local laws and regulations, and hoped that relevant countries also provided a fair and non-discriminatory environment.

TikTok is owned by Chinese company ByteDance and is available around the world but not in China. ByteDance has a domestic version called Douyin.

Ms Aziz did not mention Uyghurs in the video, but said later on Twitter she had been referring to the minority ethnic group.

Chen Quanguo, Communist Party secretary of Xinjiang, who previously held the same role in Tibet
AP

United Nations experts and rights groups estimate more than a million Uyghurs and members of other ethnic groups have been detained in camps in China's far western region of Xinjiang, which has triggered international condemnation.

China says the camps are vocational training centres to impart new skills and help root out and prevent extremism.

ByteDance has stepped up efforts to ring-fence TikTok, popular with US teenagers and those in their 20s, from much of its Chinese operations, Reuters reported on Thursday.

In a timeline on its blog post, TikTok said it had blocked another account set up by Ms Aziz that had posted an image of Osama Bin Laden which violated its content policies regarding "terrorist imagery".

On Monday, it enforced a device ban on accounts associated with violations. This affected the new account from which Ms Aziz had posted the eyelash curling video and sent from the same device, it said.

It said it had decided to override the device ban and was directly contacting her to do so.

Ms Aziz confirmed on Twitter that TikTok had restored her account but said other past videos had been deleted.

"Do I believe they took it away because of a unrelated satirical video that was deleted on a previous deleted account of mine? Right after I finished posting a three-part video about the Uyghurs? No," she posted on Twitter.

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