She denounced the existence of detention camps in China's Xinjiang region in a TikTok video disguised as a make-up tutorial. The social network blocked her account, then apologised. Here is who Feroza Aziz is.
Feroza Aziz, 17 years old, American from New Jersey, of Afghan origin. With an eyelash curler in hand and a 40-second video, she unleashed a storm on the social network of the moment, the Chinese TikTok, which according to the latest statistics has surpassed 1.5 billion downloads worldwide. "Hi guys, I'm going to teach you how to curl your lashes." That is how she began, with a line that seemed like the opening of one of the countless make-up tutorials that populate the platform. Only to abruptly change tone a few seconds later.
"Now put down the eyelash curler," Aziz continues, "and pick up your phone, to try to understand what is happening in China, in the concentration camps for Muslims." With complete nonchalance, one hand strategically held in front of her mouth to prevent video-analysis algorithms from lip-reading and identifying keywords that would have immediately triggered the video's removal, she denounces the persecutions and violence suffered by the Muslim minority of the Uyghurs in China, whose members are locked up in vast detention camps.
This girl, at 17 — let us say that again — evaded censorship and dropped her media bomb where she spotted a gap in the system. The confirmation that it hit its mark? The blocking of her TikTok account. The video, however, had already been viewed 1.5 million times, had accumulated 500,000 likes, and had been shared by other TikTok users on Twitter, racking up a further five million views. Not to mention the copies shared on YouTube and Instagram.
Shortly after posting the video, Aziz received a message from TikTok — an app unavailable in China but owned by the Chinese company ByteDance — informing her of the temporary suspension of her account "due to multiple violations of community guidelines." Rather suspicious given the timing, so much so that the 17-year-old wrote on Twitter that her account had been blocked "for trying to spread awareness." Straightforward censorship, in other words.
The social network's response was not long in coming: it rejected the accusations, stating that the problem stemmed from a second account belonging to Aziz, on which satirical videos had been posted that nonetheless featured Osama Bin Laden, and had therefore been automatically labelled by the system as terrorist content. The platform, however, blocks the device from which the account was used, which is why the girl would have lost access to her other profile as well, since she was using the same smartphone.
A few days later came the official apology: TikTok attempted to recover ground by saying it had not been a case of censorship but of human error. The girl's account was reinstated after an hour. "We would like to apologise to the user for the mistake," declared Eric Han, the app's US head of safety; "due to a human error in moderation, the video was removed. It is important to clarify that our community has no intention of preventing this content from being shared." But Aziz does not believe in coincidences. Again on Twitter: "Can I really believe that it was removed because of an 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."
China has been accused of running detention centres in the western autonomous region of Xinjiang. There are interviews with people detained in the camps who report beatings, deprivation of food, and medical experiments on prisoners. For its part, China has acknowledged the existence of certain "re-education camps," but has repeatedly denied any allegations of abuse in its facilities. The region has a population of around ten million citizens, many of whom are Uyghur or members of other ethnic minorities. In May, the United States Deputy Secretary of Defense, Randall Schriver, stated that "at least one million, but more likely we are closer to three million citizens" have been held in these facilities. Satellite images examined by the East Turkistan National Awakening Movement (Etnam), based in Washington, earlier this month identified at least 465 detention centres, labour camps and suspected prisons in Xinjiang. And a recent leak of Chinese government documents, known as the "China cables," revealed a veritable manual on the management of mass detention camps in Xinjiang, the surveillance mechanisms and the "preventive policing" system. All very, far too Orwellian.
