Digital Genocide: The New Battlefield for Uyghur Security and Cultural Survival

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By Luca Alexander Pellegrini

September 12, 2025

Image Source: Unsplash.com — **Image Source:** **Unsplash.com**

Disclaimer: The views and terminology expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the Center for Uyghur Studies.

The evolving concept of security is strikingly illuminated when examined through the lens of history and technology. Recently, as a cybersecurity professional visiting Sarajevo and Srebrenica alongside representatives of the two most influential Uyghur organizations in the world, Center for Uyghur Studies and Campaign For Uyghurs, I found myself reflecting on security’s seismic transformation.

The legacies of the Srebrenica genocide and the ongoing cultural genocide of the Uyghurs in China present a sobering double mirror: while the past teaches the consequences of failed physical and political protections, the present reveals new arenas of threat: digital, informational, and systemic.

Srebrenica, Europe’s most painful reminder of the late 20th century’s brutality, established a global imperative: protect vulnerable populations by building robust systems for warning, intervention, remediation, and remembrance. The consequences of neglect: over 8,000 lives lost in 1995, spurred new attention to international justice, atrocity prevention, and the documentation of crimes for future generations. Physical security, legal accountability, and education became the pillars of a new doctrine.

Uyghurs Digital Erasure

Today, another genocide unfolds in “Xinjiang, China”, targeting the Uyghur people through extrajudicial detentions, forced labor, mass sterilization and a systematic program of erasing their cultural, linguistic, and religious identity. Yet, unlike any previous atrocity, the Uyghurs face a double jeopardy: the obliteration is being carried out physically and digitally. Reports confirm not just the demolition of mosques and renaming of villages, but a sweeping campaign to wipe out the Uyghur presence from the internet itself.

As the old adage claims, “once something is on the internet, it’s there forever.” But the Uyghur experience proves otherwise. Websites, forums, and archives created by Uyghurs are being banned, blocked and totally removed.

The Chinese authorities deploy advanced censorship, hacking, blocking, and disinformation tactics to erase Uyghur digital footprints, ban their languages online, and monitor dissident activity via artificial intelligence and mass surveillance infrastructure. In a chilling inversion, connectivity becomes a vector of vulnerability instead of a shield.

This unprecedented digital erasure signals a new era: persecuted peoples are now targeted not only by physical violence but through the manipulation and destruction of information. Modern regimes and authoritarian governments understand that deleting records, severing communication, and re-engineering online narratives are as effective in wiping out a people’s legacy as physical destruction. Erasing the Uyghurs’ online memory, a vital repository for evidence, family contact, and collective resilience, constitutes a new form of cultural genocide.

The Imperative: Cybersecurity for the Persecuted

What can be done? Traditional defenders such as scholars, politicians, and legal specialists are vital. Yet, as the battlefield expands, so too must the tools of resistance and preservation.

I believe IT professionals and digital security specialists have become indispensable for persecuted communities, tasked with: securing digital witness testimony and archiving evidence of crimes, protecting survivors and activists from online surveillance, doxing, and harassment, developing censorship circumvention tools and encrypted communications, ensuring the resilience of diaspora cultural, historical, and language data through decentralized and distributed storage.

Failure to adapt risks not only silencing individuals but erasing collective memory, a goal shared by many regimes of repression. Only a multidisciplinary, technologically savvy response can ensure that Uyghurs and other persecuted minorities retain their voice, their history, and the evidence of their struggle for justice.

Reflecting at Srebrenica, in the company of those whose very presence is an act of defiance against erasure, it is clear that security in the 21st century means more than guns, treaties, and borders. It demands an active commitment to digital preservation, cybersecurity, and the empowerment of marginalized communities online.

Genocide in the age of AI and social media calls for a new alliance, one where the expertise of IT specialists is just as essential as that of historians and lawyers. Only then can societies honor their pledge of “never again” on every front where identity, truth, and memory are under threat.

References:

Source: uyghurstudy.org