TikTok is showing users a “politically convenient” and curated version of life in Xinjiang, flooding hashtag #Xinjiang with positive messages about the region while cleansing criticism of China’s repression of Muslim minorities, according to a new report published this week. 

Published by Australia’s Strategic Policy Institute, the report describes how China’s official line on the humanitarian crisis has been promoted to TikTok users around the world. Of the top 20 videos on TikTok’s Xinjiang hashtag, only one is critical of the Chinese Communist Party.

The report, which also looked at how the video-sharing platform’s LGBTQ hashtags in the Middle East and Russia are being shadow banned, studied how the app treated the program of oppression, surveillance and control currently underway in China’s northwest region.  It described TikTok as “a powerful political actor with a global reach,” with the ability to covertly control flows of information on its platform. 

While the subject of Xinjiang and China’s oppression of Muslim minorities is widely discussed across other social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, the Xinjiang hashtag on TikTok, owned by tech giant Bytedance, is noticeably free of criticism. A scroll through TikTok’s #Xinjiang videos shows users glossy propaganda videos and happy vlogs made by state media-linked accounts, Chinese influencers and production companies, while content that’s critical of the regime is relegated to the bottom of the feed.