Sun 28 Apr 2019:
Hong Kong (CNN Business)Arslan Hidayat was at work when the trolls attacked.
“My phone was going ‘bring, bring, bring,'” said the 31-year-old English teacher. “I was like, What the hell’s going on?”
A Facebook page he helps run which focuses on the Uyghur ethnic minority was being flooded by thousands of comments in a targeted attack by nationalist Chinese trolls.
Australian-born Hidayat lives with his wife and children in Istanbul, Turkey, which is home to a large Uyghur diaspora. Many of them have claimed in recent months that relatives in China have been swept up by the Communist Party’s crackdown on the largely Muslim minority group in the country’s far-western region of Xinjiang.
Hidayat has just such a story. He has not heard from his father-in-law, Adil Mijit, a popular comedian and entertainer, for over five months. The family fears he is among the more than one million Uyghurs believed to be detained in a vast system of “re-education camps” established in Xinjiang.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not respond to questions about Adil Mijit’s whereabouts.
Hidayat has publicized this story, and many others like it, on a Facebook page, Talk to East Turkestan (TET), to thousands of followers. The English “East Turkestan” is a translation of a term used by some Uyghurs for the territory the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) refers to as Xinjiang. The CCP views the term “East Turkestan” as politically sensitive, and those who use it as separatists.
Facebook (FB) is banned in China, as are Twitter (TWTR) and Reddit — accessing them requires jumping the Great Firewall, the country’s vast censorship and surveillance apparatus.
Despite this, these sites appear to be becoming a key battleground of Chinese influence, as a growing army of internet trolls assemble on Chinese forums and in Facebook groups to attack voices they perceive to be hostile to Beijing’s interests.