Chinese Embassy account in USA tries to spin forced sterilisation of women and mass detention camps as good for women. Twitter deems it fine

Dwarvenhobble

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The tweet itself


source to present


Twitter has told Ars Technica that a Chinese government tweet praising China's treatment of its Uighur ethnic minority does not violate its policy against hateful conduct.

Human rights advocates have characterized China's treatment of the Uighur people in the Xinjiang region of China as a demographic genocide. Here's how the Associated Press described China's approach last summer:

The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.
The population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply. Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, the AP found, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.
Thursday's tweet from the Chinese Embassy in the United States links to an article in the China Daily, a publication of the Chinese Communist Party, that disputes these claims. The article claims that as China has eradicated "religious extremism" from the region, Uighur women have freely chosen to use birth control more, leading to a decline in birth rates in the region. It dismisses claims by "some Western scholars and politicians" that China has engaged in forced sterilizations of Uighurs.
So the tweet can be seen as offensive on multiple levels.

1) the claim wives of people of a certain religion are only baby making machines, thus violating Twitters policy on hateful claims about a group of people based on in this case religious grounds

2) The Blatant lie and attempt to spin forced sterilisation and detention in camps as some great liberating thing for the women involved.
 

TheMysteriousGX

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So, standard American rhetoric about "anchor babies" or sterilizations in prisons and detention centers then?
 

Agema

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Surely these stories about Chinese concentration camps just made up by mainstream media to justify more foreign wars.
 
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CM156

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Surely these stories about Chinese concentration camps just made up by mainstream media to justify more foreign wars.
Can't tell if serious. I really hope not.
 
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Trunkage

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Can't tell if serious. I really hope not.
I would say the China Concentration camps are terrible. I would also say that the media are baised and want to overdramatise events

So we will never know the truth, one way or the other
 
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Silvanus

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Uhrm, "this tweet is no longer available".

Can't tell if serious. I really hope not.
I think you've missed the point. The Trumpist right-wing is more than happy to dismiss reports of American wrongdoing abroad in the mainstream media, but will also rely on the same outlets for information on wrongdoing in Russia and China-- because mostly only large-scale news outlets are able to report on them at all.
 

Dwarvenhobble

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No, the US sterilizing women is almost as bad as the China sterilizing women.
Which so far has very much been 4 alleged cases which haven't been investigated as far as I'm aware so. Sorry sorry to be sceptical of the claims but Rolling Stone screwed it up for everyone with their actions before.
 

Hawki

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Stuff like this is part of why I'm very uneasy about banning Trump. If you do that, and not others, then what kind of message does it send? I know some people are going to cite "whataboutism" or "bothsideism," but I can loathe Trump while also pointing out double standards.
 

Thaluikhain

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Stuff like this is part of why I'm very uneasy about banning Trump. If you do that, and not others, then what kind of message does it send? I know some people are going to cite "whataboutism" or "bothsideism," but I can loathe Trump while also pointing out double standards.
Why is banning Trump and then banning other similar people not an option? Ok, there's only usually one POTUS at a a time, but still, Twitter could update its banhammering rules.
 

Hawki

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Why is banning Trump and then banning other similar people not an option? Ok, there's only usually one POTUS at a a time, but still, Twitter could update its banhammering rules.
Well, it's technically an option, but it hasn't been done.

Thing is, there's a case for banning Trump from Twitter, in that his tweets incited violence. Most people would agree that free speech stops short here. But if we're assuming Twitter IS stopping short here, then it's going to fan the flames even more. And while part of me wants to see Trump keep his Twitter account so that his sad, pathetic ramblings remain for all posterity, on the other, we've seen that those ramblings have consequences.

I dunno. I'm hoping that come inagguration, there's a heavy police/National Guard presence, because there were warnings for this, and there's warnings for that. Hopefully when Trump's gone, some of our attention can go to the other fuckwits of the world, and yes, that includes the CCP and Khameni.
 

Houseman

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Why is banning Trump and then banning other similar people not an option? Ok, there's only usually one POTUS at a a time, but still, Twitter could update its banhammering rules.
As is the case for individuals with double-standards, it's not about the values they claim to have, it's because they have an ulterior motive.
 

CM156

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Stuff like this is part of why I'm very uneasy about banning Trump. If you do that, and not others, then what kind of message does it send? I know some people are going to cite "whataboutism" or "bothsideism," but I can loathe Trump while also pointing out double standards.
Khamenei is partially responsible for Twitter being banned in Iran (and it has been for over a decade now)

For that reason alone he shouldn't be allowed to use the platform. Nor should any Iranian government official or government office.

His calls for the violent destruction of Israel are arguably an additional reason to ban him.
 
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Agema

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Can't tell if serious.
Yes, exactly.

Stuff like this is part of why I'm very uneasy about banning Trump. If you do that, and not others, then what kind of message does it send? I know some people are going to cite "whataboutism" or "bothsideism," but I can loathe Trump while also pointing out double standards.
It is profoundly obvious that Twitter's approach to censuring is in many ways inconsistent on a global level. But then, the world is inconsistent.

I think Twitter effectively intervenes at a national level: it more cares about what Americans say in America, what Israelis say in Israel, what Chinese say in China. It is not really applying rules that Americans believe in to the Chinese and Israelis, or vice versa. Twitter is also Americocentric. Obviously, despite its global reach it's a US company with an overwhelmingly US workforce and shareholders, its key operations under US law, and the US is its single biggest source of revenue. It is thus unusually concerned about how Americans feel compared to anyone else, and Americans are primarily sensitive about domestic issues.

There is also a basic idea of a "seriousness" argument - which one could take as an idea of intent. The simplest representation of this is when someone is annoying and another says "I could kill him". But we all know that is not a statement of intent or encouragement for anyone else to do so. Likewise that someone with 30 followers and no history of activism or troublemaking is just spouting and none of it is meant to go anywhere, or will go anywhere. If we actually, genuinely pursued people for this sort of casual talk no matter what the medium, then we'd have most of the country in front of a court. I can bet you that at some point that I and every one of you has at some point said something that is at face value supporting violence when stripped of context. In that sense, a random chump saying "Kill Trump" genuinely is a million miles away from and less worth taking action over than Trump saying "Americans need to rise up and fight for democracy".

In that sense, what Twitter is doing is not consistent, but it is pragmatic, responsive; and in many respects quite sensible - at least from its own perspective.
 
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Revnak

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So, a thing that’s kinda skipped over here, isn’t this just kinda bog standard enforcement of China’s two child policy? The sterilization that is, not the concentration camps. Like, this isn’t new, China’s been doing batshit population control policies for decades.
 

Revnak

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Khamenei is partially responsible for Twitter being banned in Iran (and it has been for over a decade now)

For that reason alone he shouldn't be allowed to use the platform. Nor should any Iranian government official or government office.

His calls for the violent destruction of Israel are arguably an additional reason to ban him.
Yeah, but how else will I be able to send him screenshots of hentai in his dms?