Social media giant Facebook recently took on the Australian government’s policy of paying for news content and blocked the Australian news sharing service. Meanwhile, British media have revealed that Facebook received funding from Chinese media to help the Chinese government conduct a major Facebook outreach campaign to deny the persecution of the Uighur and other ethnic minorities in Xinjiang.
The Press Gazette reported that Facebook received hundreds of dollars each from Chinese media outlets such as China Daily and China Global Television Network (CGTN) to promote the campaign to millions of Facebook users.
The report mentioned that even though Facebook is blocked in China, the official media China Global Television Network, China Daily, Xinhua News Agency, People’s Daily and CCTV have held five of the top six most liked news fan pages on Facebook worldwide with the help of Facebook ads since 2018.
China Daily, for example, paid Facebook just $400 for an October article that reached more than 1 million Facebook users, using ads to accuse Western countries of “lying” and “spreading fake news,” and in another article The video accused reports of re-Education camps in Xinjiang of being “completely false” and “a Western media ploy” and said that “reports of oppression in Xinjiang are a myth that the Western media refuse to give up.
The China Global Television Network also paid Facebook for advertising, paying between $200 and $299 last month to promote an article on “How the Western media distorts #Xinjiang boarding schools”; the same month, the media outlet reported on “What is the real state of boarding schools in Xinjiang? What difference are these schools making to local students?” was viewed by 1 million Facebook users for less than $500.
Imran Ahmed, the executive director of the Center Against Digital Hate, said it was “disgusting” that Facebook was being paid to promote Beijing and deny the reality of China’s human rights abuses. Facebook’s claim that it didn’t notice that five of its six most popular news fan pages were promoting division and whitewashing atrocities is so absurd that no one will believe they didn’t notice.”
Recent Comments