It is a thank you for removing thousands of videos critical of the country.

Early next month, look for announcement from a tech company all of you know, about a new partnership in this very large Asian country.

It is a thank you for removing thousands upon thousands of videos critical of the country.

YouTube

China

YouTube takes down Xinjiang videos, forces rights group to seek alternative

June 25 (Reuters) – A human rights group that attracted millions of views on YouTube to testimonies from people who say their families have disappeared in China’s Xinjiang region is moving its videos to little-known service Odysee after some were taken down by the Google-owned streaming giant, two sources told Reuters.

The group, credited by international organizations like Human Rights Watch for drawing attention to human rights violations in Xinjiang, has come under fire from Kazakh authorities since its founding in 2017.

Serikzhan Bilash, a Xinjiang-born Kazakh activist who co-founded the channel and has been arrested multiple times for his activism, said government advisors told him five years ago to stop using the word “genocide” to describe the situation in Xinjiang – an order he assumed came from pressure from China’s government on Kazakhstan.

“They’re just facts,” Bilash said to Reuters in a phone interview, referring to the content of Atajurt’s videos. “The people giving the testimonies are talking about their loved ones.”

Atajurt Kazakh Human Rights’ channel has published nearly 11,000 videos on YouTube totaling over 120 million views since 2017, thousands of which feature people speaking to camera about relatives they say have disappeared without a trace in China’s Xinjiang region, where UN experts and rights groups estimate over a million people have been detained in recent years.

On June 15, the channel was blocked for violating YouTube’s guidelines, according to a screenshot seen by Reuters, after twelve of its videos had been reported for breaching its ‘cyberbullying and harassment’ policy.

The channel’s administrators had appealed the blocking of all twelve videos between April and June, with some reinstated – but YouTube did not provide an explanation as to why others were kept out of public view, the administrators told Reuters.

Following inquiries from Reuters as to why the channel was removed, YouTube restored it, explaining that it had received multiple so-called ‘strikes’ for videos which contained people holding up ID cards to prove they were related to the missing, violating a YouTube policy which prohibits personally identifiable information from appearing in its content. They reinstated the channel on June 18 but asked Atajurt to blur the IDs. – Source