TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — An X community note added to a video allegedly showing police beating a Uyghur man erroneously claimed that the officers were Taiwanese.
On Jan. 13, an X page called Mossad Commentary posted a video purporting to show Chinese police officers beating a Uyghur man in handcuffs. In the disturbing video, two young men in dark uniforms drag the man out of the patrol car, throw him to the ground, and kick him repeatedly.
A community note surfaced beneath the video claiming the video description was "purposefully misleading," as it alleged the men in the video were "Taiwanese police forces." The note said the officers were Taiwanese based on their uniforms and the license plate on the police vehicle.
Tu Cheng-che (杜承哲), an attending physician at Cheng Ching Hospital in Taichung, posted images of the license plate in the video, a Chinese license plate, and a Taiwanese license plate, showing that the plate in the video was consistent with that in China. Another X user posted photos showing the men in the video resemble those of the standard Chinese police uniform that includes a jacket, rather than the Taiwanese police uniform, which is lighter in color and weight.
In addition, the Chinese spoken by the man capturing the video does not seem to match the Mandarin spoken in Taiwan.
On Wednesday (Jan. 17), X removed the previous note without explaining. It uploaded a new note saying the "original video" provides a better view of the license plate (鄂F1573警), which points to the video being filmed in Hubei, China.
The video that the community note linked to was uploaded by a user with the handle "Ken" on Feb. 12, 2020. However, this was not the first time the video had been made public.
The footage was reportedly originally posted on X and Facebook by the website Documenting Oppression Against Muslims (DOAM) in 2018, per NextShark. According to DOAM, the video showed a Uyghur Muslim man being kicked by Chinese police.
Formerly known as Birdwatch, Community Notes is a feature on X that is crowdsourced and designed to counter disinformation. However, Wired cited Community Notes contributors as saying the feature is "prone to manipulation," lacks transparency, and is "not up to the task of policing the platform for misinformation."
Tweet by Chinese artist "Bad ї ucao" showing screenshot of original community note:
Twitter‘s community note is abused again.
This video is indeed filmed in China. Anyone who understand Chinese can tell the language they used in the video is from China instead of Taiwan.
But the community note states it is from Taiwan instead. pic.twitter.com/Exx3t3A9hS
— 巴丢草 Bad ї ucao (@badiucao) January 16, 2024
Tweet with corrected community note:
Chinese policemen beat and [murdered] a member of the Uyghur minority while he was handcuffed? pic.twitter.com/ToyK5OGZFe
— Mossad Commentary (@MOSSADil) January 12, 2024
