NEW YORK - Simply viewing a photo of the Quran in the Xinjiang region of China is enough to be designated a dangerous extremist by government officials, according to a Human Right Watch report released Wednesday, writes Mack DeGeurin in Gizmodo.com.
Chinese police maintain a “master list” of around 50,000 video, audio, and photo files they claim contain violent and harmful content.
Individuals found with copies of those files stored on their own devices were reportedly flagged and brought in for interrogation. That supposedly violent content? Quran readings and wedding songs, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). HRW says it analyzed around 1,000 files flagged by police in more than 11 million searches during a nine-month period between 2017 and 2018.
More than half (57%) of those flagged files were media HRW describes as “common religious material,” something any Muslim anywhere in the world might have saved on their phone.
Only 9% of the flagged files contained explicitly violent content, and just 4% included calls for violence, according to HRW.
