After reviewing hundreds of 2021 videos and posts, the human rights research and advocacy group found content that often portrayed Black people through “offensive racial stereotypes.”

Social media platforms in China have come under fire by Human Rights Watch for allegedly disregarding widespread racism against Black people while generating profit.

According to Aljazeera, after reviewing hundreds of videos and posts from 2021 on platforms such as Weibo, a microblogging app, and Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, the human rights research and advocacy group discovered content that often depicted Black people through “offensive racial stereotypes.”

“The amount and extremity of racist content on the Chinese internet suggest that the platforms either are not meeting their own standards banning racist content,” stated the HRW report, “or that their policies are inadequate when addressing racist content, both contrary to their human rights responsibilities.”

 

 

 

 

According to their report, the group discovered similar content on the video-sharing website Bilibili, the livestream and video app Kuaishou, plus the social networking and e-commerce site Xiaohongshu. These platforms, however, had yet to take any action to remove it.

Human Rights Watch observed that influencer videos portraying Black Africans as uncivilized or reliant on Chinese people as their saviors were shared with particular popularity, according to Aljazeera. Chinese people in unions with Blacks were branded traitors, while Black individuals who married Chinese were accused online of “contaminating” and endangering the Chinese race. Chinese women in interracial relationships are frequently the target of internet abuse, with threats of rape, doxing and death.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, allegations of prejudice towards Africans in China surfaced when some were evicted from their homes and singled out for quarantine, drawing unusual criticism from African leaders. Some Africans in China claimed that long before then, “blackface” and racial caricatures were used in state media and advertisements to target them with racism and xenophobia.

Source: Human Rights Watch: Social media networks in China are ignoring rampant racism against Black people