Female frontier influencers are new face of China's propaganda: Report

Female influencers from ethnic minority communities have become the new face of Chinese propaganda to counter criticisms of its human rights abuses, according to an Australia-based think tank. In the report titled ‘Frontier influencers: the new face of China’s propaganda’, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute has raised concerns over the use of sophisticated content by female China-based ethnic-minority influencers from the troubled frontier regions of Xinjiang, Tibet and Inner Mongolia, which the think tank refers as ‘frontier influencers’ or ‘frontier accounts’, to promote disinformation and seed the internet with its preferred narratives. “For viewers, the video content appears to be the creation of the individual influencers, but is in fact what’s referred to in China as ‘professional user generated content’, or content that’s produced with the help of special influencer-management agencies known as multi-channel networks.” While such active presence of frontier influencers on Western social media platforms like YouTube is fraught with danger, the report found that they are carefully vetted and considered “politically reliable.” “The content they create is tightly circumscribed via self-censorship and oversight from their MCNs and domestic video platforms before being published on YouTube,” the report added. In an assessment report released in August 2022, the UN Human Rights Office said that serious human rights violations have been committed in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous region in the context of the government’s application of counter-terrorism and counter-“extremism” strategies.