Analyzing Blogs About Uyghur Discourse Using Topic Induced Hyperlink Network

The Uyghurs are a Turkic ethnic group that descends from the general region of Central and East Asia. In recent years, the Chinese government has been accused of violating the human rights of Uyghur Muslims by imprisoning them in camps and subjecting them to forced labor, forced abortion, and other harmful treatments. Aside from Western news outlets, much information about the Uyghur issue is available on blogs and social media. The information found in these blogs provides an alternative lens to analyze the Uyghur discourse from nontraditional media outlets. Existing studies have analyzed different contents of blogs, such as the authors and comments. This research aims to employ a systematic approach to analyze information spread through hyperlinks from Uyghur-related blog posts in the Indo-Pacific region. We analyzed 318 blog posts and 5,598 hyperlinks published from January 2019 to September 2022 to achieve this. The analysis included topic modeling and toxicity analysis to identify the main topics in each blog post and their toxicity trends. The topics generated from the topic modeling were mapped onto a network of hyperlinks to develop a topic-induced network. This network helped examine, analyze, and visualize the network of blog hyperlinks that further revealed influential blog conduits raising awareness about the oppression of the Uyghur community.