The Blanked Out Parts On China's Baidu Mapping Platform Is Telling The World Where Its Prisons And Internment Camps Are In Xinjiang

A masked tile on Baidu Maps. Baidu / Via map.baidu.com

Buzz Feed News: Blanked-Out Spots On China's Maps Helped Us Uncover Xinjiang's Camps

China's Baidu blanked out parts of its mapping platform. We used those locations to find a network of buildings bearing the hallmarks of prisons and internment camps in Xinjiang. Here's how we did it.

In the summer of 2018, as it became even harder for journalists to work effectively in Xinjiang, a far-western region of China, we started to look at how we could use satellite imagery to investigate the camps where Uighurs and other Muslim minorities were being detained. At the time we began, it was believed that there were around 1,200 camps in existence, while only several dozen had been found. We wanted to try to find the rest.

Our breakthrough came when we noticed that there was some sort of issue with satellite imagery tiles loading in the vicinity of one of the known camps while using the Chinese mapping platform Baidu Maps. The satellite imagery was old, but otherwise fine when zoomed out — but at a certain point, plain light gray tiles would appear over the camp location. They disappeared as you zoomed in further, while the satellite imagery was replaced by the standard gray reference tiles, which showed features such as building outlines and roads.

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WNU Editor: After reading this article and thinking of the sheer scale of these camps. There has to be more than a million Uighurs in these camps.