Accessing the account

Twitter has blocked the account of the Chinese embassy in the US because of an offensive post about Uighurs. This was reported by Bloomberg.

The embassy's page said that thanks to the Chinese authorities policies, Uighur women are no longer "baby-making machines". Twitter hid the post 24 hours later.

According to the social network's rules, the embassy will not be able to post anything on its account until it itself deletes the unacceptable message.

"We took action on this tweet due to a violation of our rules against dehumanisation", a Twitter spokesperson explained. The social network prohibits "dehumanising a group of people on the basis of their religion, caste, age, disability, serious illness, national origin, race or ethnicity".

Uighurs in China are a national minority. They inhabit the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of the PRC and mostly practice Islam. The UN said in 2018 that Chinese authorities were pushing ethnic minorities, including Uighurs, into camps. Gay McDougall, a member of the UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination, claimed that more than 3 million ethnic Uighurs were held in the camps in secrecy.

Chinese authorities consider the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region to be untrustworthy and have conducted campaigns against "terrorism, separatism and religious extremism" there. China's Foreign Ministry has stated that it is terrorism, not infringement of national minorities' rights, that is the region's problem. The country's authorities call what is happening an internal Chinese affair.