U.S.-based IPVM in a report published on Wednesday said software capable of identifying Uighurs appears in Alibaba's Cloud Shield content moderation service for websites. Alibaba describes Cloud Shield as a system that "detects and recognizes text, pictures, videos, and voices containing pornography, politics, violent terrorism, advertisements, and spam, and provides verification, marking, custom configuration and other capabilities." Consequently, if a Uighur livestreams a video on a website signed up to Cloud Shield, the software can detect that the user is Uighur and flag the video for review or removal, IPVM researcher Charles Rollet told Reuters. IPVM said mention of Uighurs in the software disappeared near the time it published its report. “We have eliminated any ethnic tag in our product offering," an Alibaba spokeswoman told Reuters.

Source: The Standard December 18, 2020 02:15 UTC