Everything You Need To Know About The Camps In China, As Told By A TikTok Beauty Tutorial

you could learn a lot from makeup tutorials — how to mixture your contour, put on the best cat eye, or maybe, if you’re watching17-year-old Feroza Aziz, learn about the genocide against Uyghur Muslims in China.


On Saturday (November 23), the high school junior from New Jersey uploaded a video of herself in her bedroom holding an eyelash curler. “Hi guys, so I’m going to teach you guys how to get long lashes,” she starts, instructing her viewers to clasp their lashes with an eyelash curler: “Then you’re going to put [the curler] down and use your phone that you’re using now to search up what’s happening in China.” She then specifics some of what Uyghur Muslims are being forced to endure in concentration camps in China’s Xinjiang region.


Feroza tells MTV News she first learned about the plight facing an estimated 1 million people in 2018. “I noticed out through victim's stories, like Mihrigul Tursun, and through video evidence on Uyghur Muslim pages of Muslims being tortured,” she adds.


As NBC News reports, the Uyghur Muslim people, a local ethnic order, have been forced to endure surveilance and scrutiny by the Chinese government for years. The UN has called the scenario “a massive internment camp shrouded in caution, something of a no-rights zone.” Chinese officials have denied these characterizations, and claim they’re attempting to prevent “terrorism” and “extremism;” as Human Rights Watch reports, the country’s working definition of what constitutes such activities is pointedly vague.


“I really hope that my videos bring awareness to the Uyghurs. I don't want attention myself. I want the Uyghurs to get attention,” Feroza says. “We need to use our voices to stop this. We need the UN to step in and help these people. Millions of folks are being tortured. This is a genocide and no one is talking about it.”


Feroza’s video, which she posted to her TikTok account @getmefamouspartthree, has procured hundreds of thousands of likes since she first posted it; while she woke up on Sunday, she realized it had began to spread to other platforms as well. A couple of tweets containing the video, which has been viewed over 3.6 million times, have all gone viral — Feroza even began a Twitter account to keep up with the spread of the clip.


Co-opting a recognizable format served two purposes for the teen. “I realized that I might use a fake makeup tutorial video for the initial few seconds to reel viewers in to then speak about the Uyghurs, which several people don't know about,” Feroza says. “If they knew that the video was going to be about a human rights violation, I'm not sure several people would have clicked on the video to watch it. And secondly, I realized that using the makeup trick could be a fantastic disguise to protect my video from being taken down.”


“I did not know it would reach millions of people across all social media platforms, and I'm overwhelmed with happiness that it did,” she adds. “I knew that with all this attention, I had to do more. To hear about China's discrimination against Uyghurs was heartbreaking. I knew I had to mention something. People need to know.”


Although the spread of the video may have been slowed in part because TikTok, which is owned by the Chinese agency ByteDance, froze her account on Monday (November 25). She mentioned this has happened to her before — she made her current account soon after a previous stage name was banned for satirizing anti-Muslim bigotry; a TikTok spokesperson told the Washington Post that video triggered a ban because it broke rules about “promoting terrorist content.” According to the post, her new account was locked as the organization detected she had been using the same phone as she did for a previous account, and that she’d have the ability to access her new performer name from another device. “TikTok does not moderate content due to political sensitivities and did not do so in this case,” agency instructed them Post.


She tweeted on Wednesday morning that her account was working again. She told MTV News that she had never been “given a reason by Tik Tok for this suspension, nor have I been given a chance to appeal this suspension, as most accounts generally are.”


While TikTok generally markets itself as being an app for “positivity,” plenty of creators have noticed ways to educate their followers while simultaneously racking up likes. In October, a couple of teenagers went viral for videos in which they danced along to their exes’ abusive voicemails, exposing a particular sort of domestic emotional violence that affects approximately one third of teenagers in relationships. A Nevada high schooler used TikTok to support her teachers get raises. And another viral video cleverly made a case for the redistribution of wealth as far as billionaires are concerned, given that Bill Gates could theoretically purchase the full NFL and have plenty of cash left over for Super Bowl ads.


According to Feroza, using TikTok to discuss heavier and intricate topics shouldn’t be believed an anomaly, especially given that she talks about world issues all of the time with her companions. “I think TikTok can be used for anything, whether it be sports, makeup, politics, or fashion,” she says. “Hundreds of thousands of users are downloading the app weekly, so it might honestly help to bring so several groups with each other. Normally on Tik Tok you visualize funny meme videos or lighthearted jokes,” she adds, however stresses that her video’s virality proves there’s a crowd for humanitarian issues, too.


“My companions routinely tell me they know so much more about issues because of me informing them,” she says. “People need to remember that our voices matter and can change anything. It's up to us if we desire to use them or not.”