A teenage girl has been temporarily banned from TikTok for posting a video with a hidden 'anti-China' message.
Feroza Aziz, 17, from New Jersey, US, was sharing her beauty tips on curling eyelashes on the hugely popular video platform while condemning China's crackdown on Muslims in Xinjiang.
She told her viewers in the 40-second clip: "Use the phone that you're using right now to search up what's happening in China."
The Afghan American then alleged the Uyghur Muslims imprisoned in the re-education camps have been beaten, raped and even forced to eat pork and drink alcohol.
She added: "People who go into these concentration camps don't come out alive.
"This is another Holocaust, and yet nobody is talking about it. Please be aware, and please spread awareness."
The video, which she posted last week and has racked up 1.6 million views, has been taken down by the Chinese-owned company ByteDance, but only to be restored later.
Feroza also said she had been blocked from posting videos on TikTok for a month.
"I think it's extremely fishy that right when I post those videos about China, my account gets suspended," she said, in an interview with Rolling Stone .
Eric Han, the app's US head of safety, was quoted saying: "We would like to apologise to the user for the error on our part.
"Due to a human moderation error, the viral video from November 23 was removed. It's important to clarify that nothing in our community guidelines precludes content such as this video, and it should not have been removed."
In a timeline on its blog post, TikTok said it had blocked another account set up by Aziz that had posted an image of Osama Bin Laden which violated its content policies regarding 'terrorist imagery', says Reuters.
TikTok said it had now lifted the ban and but Feroza said she 'is not scared of TikTok' and will continue to spread awareness on issues that she believes it 'need to be talked about' including the Kashmir and Afghanistan.
China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang accused the US of attempting to meddle in its affairs, and said there were no "ethnic, religious, human rights" issues in the region.
"The measures that the Xinjiang government takes are about counter-terrorism and de-radicalisation," Mr Geng said at a briefing yesterday.
