TikTok user Feroza Aziz’s viral video started as a regular beauty tutorial.
“The first thing you need to do is to grab your lash-curler, curl your lashes obviously,” Aziz said.
She says, what followed next got her suspended from TikTok - a Chinese social media app that has recently been gaining immense popularity, especially in Asia.
“Now put it down, and use your phone you’re using right now to search what’s happening in China,” she said in the video, widely shared on other social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
“They’re getting concentration camps, storing innocent Muslims in there, separating families from each other, kidnapping them, murdering them, kidnapping them,” she continued as she held her eyelash curler to her eye.
“This is another holocaust, yet no one is talking about it… So, you can grab your eyelash curler again…,” she continued.
Here is a trick to getting longer lashes! #tiktok #muslim #muslimmemes #islam pic.twitter.com/r0JR0HrXbm
— feroza.x (@x_feroza) November 25, 2019
Aziz later shared screenshots showing that her video had been marked as sensitive content and her account temporarily suspended due to multiple violations of TikTok’s community guidelines.
Aziz then began sharing the eyelash curling tutorial video and other follow-up videos on Twitter and Instagram.
“TikTok ain’t slick. They’re scared,” she said in an Instagram story.
“TikTok took down my video, but anyway…Spreading awareness does wonder. We got the UN to step up and help Sudan because we spread awareness - we can do the same for China,” she said in a follow-up video she shared on Twitter.
China has been accused of a brutal crackdown on its Muslim minority, especially in the last three years.
Reports say a million Muslims, mostly Uighurs from Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, in the northwest of the country, are currently held in detention camps without trials.
The Chinese government says that they are simply education centers set up to prevent extremism. Recently leaked secret China cables detail dozens of pages containing how Beijing executes its strategy including monitoring people, forcing inmates to memorize the ideology, and forcing repentance and confessions in high-security prisons.
The Chinese officials also determine if inmates, who are separated from their families, will be allowed to see their families after their release.
Another report in early November also said Muslim women whose husbands have been kept in the internment camps are forced to share their beds with male government officials as part of the government’s surveillance program ‘Pair up and become a family’.
