NEW: Republicans want Chinese Facebook ads about Uyghurs banned as misinformation
Story on the Washington Examiner website here: Republicans want Chinese Facebook ads about Uyghurs banned as misinformation
Congressional Republicans are calling on Facebook to ban the Chinese government from spreading propaganda and misinformation after recent Chinese ads portrayed Uyghur Muslims as thriving when they are facing a genocide.
The GOP is accusing Facebook of hypocrisy in banning conservatives such as former President Donald Trump for violence-inducing content but at the same time allowing dangerous Chinese propaganda to exist on the platform. Republicans want aggressive action taken against Big Tech platforms that they say discriminate against conservatives.
“Big Tech companies say they’re committed to preventing the spread of political misinformation, but platforms like Facebook are allowing the CCP to publish ads covering up their human rights abuses in Xinjiang,” Republican Rep. Greg Steube of Florida told the Washington Examiner.
“Big Tech needs to focus on banning these dangerous communist propaganda campaigns rather than censoring conservatives,” said Steube, who is on the House Judiciary Committee, including its subcommittees on crime and terrorism along with antitrust. Both subcommittees have jurisdiction over Big Tech companies such as Facebook.
The Chinese government is using Facebook as a vessel for state propaganda and misinformation to show Muslim ethnic minority Uyghurs flourishing in China's Xinjiang region, according to a Wall Street Journal report Friday, while the U.S. government has declared they are experiencing a genocide.
Although Facebook is blocked internally in China, the Chinese Communist Party regularly uses the platform to spread its political messages to hundreds of millions of people outside its borders through content and advertisements.
The Facebook ads and posts by the Chinese government and affiliated media organizations include videos of adults and children in Xinjiang claiming on camera that their lives are getting better and that Western countries, such as the United States, are attempting to undermine and destabilize China.
But reports by human rights groups detail torture, rape, killings, and other abuse against an estimated 1 million to 2 million Uyghur Muslims and other religious minorities in the western Xinjiang region, where many have been placed in detention centers. President Joe Biden declared last month that there was ongoing genocide against millions of Uyghurs.
Chinese officials have denied charges of there being a genocide and defended their “vocational education and training centers” as efforts to combat extremism and terrorism.
Key Republicans in Congress are pushing Facebook and other major social media platforms to more fairly enforce their content moderation standards and stop foreign adversaries from abusing their platform.
“We continue to see Big Tech companies being used by the Chinese Communist Party and other authoritarian regimes to spread disinformation beyond their borders, including denying the horrific treatment of Uyghur Muslims in the Xinjiang region,” a Republican aide on the House Energy & Commerce Committee told the Washington Examiner.
“This harmful content is allowed to proliferate on social media platforms even as Big Tech silences conservative political speech they disagree with,” said the aide, who works for Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the top Republican on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over content moderation regulations.
Facebook told the Wall Street Journal that the Chinese ads regarding Uyghurs in Xinjiang did not violate its current policies since the advertisers followed the platform’s rules when buying them.
Twitter, Facebook, and other social media giants have faced criticisms from across the U.S. and European political spectrum in recent years, as Russian influence operations and their own ad hoc approach to managing the content on their platforms has exposed them to allegations of negligence and censorship.
Top Republicans in February went so far as to say that, left by Democrats with few other options, their party is entertaining the idea of breaking up Big Tech companies in the hope of countering unfair and selective censorship.
Conservative tech scholars say that Facebook is failing to follow its own rules when it comes to content moderation and human rights.
“Facebook isn’t following its own human rights policy. It requires no due diligence on Facebook’s part to know that Uyghurs, a Muslim minority in China, are regularly abused in Xinjiang,” Lora Ries, a scholar at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, emailed the Washington Examiner.
“Why does Facebook give a pass to the Chinese Communist Party but labels, reduces, and removes American content based on political opinion?” said Ries, who is the director of the Center for Technology Policy at Heritage.