Science, Technology, and Social Media

Twitter Refuses To Say Why It’s Promoting A Chinese Tech Group That Allegedly Tracks Uighers

Twitter refused to explain to the Daily Caller News Foundation why it is promoting a Chinese tech group that allegedly tracks Uigher Muslims.

The DCNF reached out to Twitter multiple times on Tuesday asking why Twitter promoted a Huawei Christmas tweet. A confidential Huawei “interoperability report” obtained by IPVM allegedly found that the Chinese technology companies Huawei and Megvii worked together to test software that would recognize Uigher Muslims and then alert the police.

The report was formerly public on Huawei’s website, though it was marked confidential, and the company deleted it after IPVM reached out for comment, according to IPVM.

Twitter declined to explain to the DCNF why it allowed the promotion of the Huawei tweet.

Multiple publications have reported that the Chinese government targets and commits “demographic genocide” against Uighur Muslims through forced abortions, birth control, mass detentions, and imprisonment — though the Chinese government denies this and says that such stories are “fabricated” and “fake news.”

Screenshot of Huawei Twitter promotion.

Huawei said it is opposed to discrimination in a December statement to the BBC. “We provide general-purpose connectivity products based on recognised industry standards, and we comply with ethics and governance systems around emerging technology,” Huawei said in the statement.

“We do not develop or sell systems that identify people by their ethnicity, and we do not condone the use of our technologies to discriminate against or oppress members of any community,” Huawei said. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the DCNF.

Huawei has previously come under fire for its surveillance technologies, prompting Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to accuse the company of harnessing “U.S. technology in a manner that undermines U.S. national security and foreign policy interests.” Huawei has denied that it spies on behalf of the Chinese government.

“Huawei is a disaster,” President Donald Trump said on Fox News this summer, suggesting that the company spies on American citizens. “They used to have free reign over our country. They knew everything we were doing. Huawei is a way of really I call it the ‘spywei’. What happens is Huawei comes out and they spy on our country.”

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