| To hear the Chinese government tell it, the crackdown on Uyghurs in the nation's far west has been eased. Most of the million-plus people—most of them members of a Muslim minority—have been released from detention camps, and the notorious campaign of surveillance, harassment, and cultural suppression isn't a problem the US and Western countries need to worry about. But as Isobel Cockerell writes this week on Backchannel, there's a new way to show that these official claims are false: the social media app TikTok. Around the world, Uyghur expatriates and others have been scouring the app—best known for teenage users and cute videos set to pop music—to find evidence that the mass surveillance and government brainwashing effort is as worrisome as ever. As Cockerell explains, the TikTok detectives are uncovering things like "a video of a propaganda rally, with Uyghurs singing songs praising the Communist Party of China; footage from inside an Uyghur orphanage for children with parents in detention; crowds of Uyghurs chanting in Mandarin rather than their native Uyghur language; a mosque being demolished." One woman, who'd been forced to flee Xinjiang province without her children, stumbled across a video of her own 6-year-old daughter filmed in what appears to be a Chinese orphanage. It was the first time she'd seen the girl in years. For the most part, the Trump administration has turned a blind eye to the rampant abuse, focusing instead on its on-again, off-again economic negotiations with China and preferring not to complicate its trade war with thorny questions of human rights violations. The ad hoc TikTok evidence is showing the world that, with a little creative use of technology, even blindness can't block out the truth. Mark Robinson | Features Editor, WIRED | 
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