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A Free Monthly Publication For Tibetan Issues & Community Information Rgd No. HPENG/2013/51798
Support for Tibet Grows within the Indian Government By Peter Newman Recent commentary from a number of senior Indian officials has indicated that the political climate in New Delhi is warming to increased support for Tibet. In the wake of the Tibet-friendly Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) election victories in May especially, Indian leaders are becoming increasingly vocal regarding their concern for the rights of Tibetans in Tibet. Evidence of mounting government support came most recently during a one-day conference on the 1913 Shimla Convention on July 3 in
RSS Leader Indresh Kumar pledged more support to Tibet on his visit to the CTA Photo: Tenzin Sangmo/VoA
New Delhi. During the conference, former Special Director of India’s Intelligence Bureau RN Ravi made his support for Tibet clear, stating “India-China friendship is not possible without resolution of the Tibet issue, guaranteeing satisfaction and dignity of its people [Tibetans].” The conference also saw Senior BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi affirm his support for the Tibetan people and decry what he described as China’s use of “violent means to change Tibet’s demography” - a reference to Continued on page 6
Volume: XVI Issue: 6
31 JULY 2014
Free Tibet Exposes Tweets as Propaganda By Daisy Hughes On July 21, The New York Times (NYT) published an article “Its Another Perfect Day in Tibet!” exposing a series of fake Twitter accounts that Photo: Free Tibet have been used to spread Chinese propaganda. The investigation was carried out by Free Tibet and later reported in the British Guardian, and the American NBC News and Los Angeles Times. The NYT article focuses on the account of “Tom Hugo” which has been used to share photographs of Tibetans in “unique exotic dress,” articles that celebrate Chinese rule of Tibet, and video clips showing happy Tibetans singing and dancing on staterun television. “Tom Hugo”, however, is not real. The photo accompanying the Twitter profile actually pictures a Brazilian model named Felipe Berto and, according to the NYT, nearly every video, article and photograph tweeted comes via propaganda websites linked to the Chinese government. According to the photograph shown on the NYT website of his Twitter profile, “Tom Hugo” had 2,637 followers. Free Tibet, an advocacy group based in London, has identified nearly 100 similar fake accounts in recent days which are being used to spread proChinese news and stories about Tibet and Xinjiang (a province in North West China whose Uyghur Muslim population is subject to similar human rights violations to Tibet). Alistair
Currie, media manager for Free Tibet has said, “when it comes to Tibet, nothing that China does surprises us, but this appears to be something new”. He continued, “we think the scope of this is beyond the capacity of our organisation to investigate.” The NYT article concedes that there is “no direct evidence to link the Chinese government to the phoney accounts” but argues that “the content and breadth of the effort would suggest the involvement of a state actor.” It links these incidents with the actions of the so-called Fifty Cent Party, a group of people employed by the Chinese government to make proCommunist posts on Internet message boards and chat rooms. The NYT calls these efforts to sway opinion through social media “ham-handed” as other fake Twitter accounts identified by Free Tibet
“Tom Hugo’s” fake Twitter page Photo: nytimes.com
use photographs of actors, eg, Erica Durance from the American television series “Smallville”, and even Syd Barrett, the lead vocalist of Pink Floyd, who died in 2006. The NYT reported on July 22 that Twitter suspended many of these fake accounts “just hours” after the publication of their first article, including that of “Tom Hugo”.