You don't need to trust anybody's reporting, you can go browse Weibo or Toutiao or Douyin and go see for yourself what regular Chinese people are saying all across China right now. Sure, anything overly political is (self-)censored and there's some actual paid wumao shills in there, but day-to-day stuff like grumbling about local government incompetence is widespread. Here's the Xinjiang hashtag, go nuts:
The Xinjiang hashtag isn't really a good target, because it's high-profile enough that there's probably a dedicated team of censors monitoring it.
And of course Weibo search doesn't work for Uyghur content. Try finding this post using any of the words in it: https://m.weibo.cn/detail/4606432605644442 I found it by searching for Uyghur words in Latin script to find someone posting in Uyghur, then looking through their posting history.
I think Weibo is pretty much useless as a source of unfiltered information, unless you're already a heavy Weibo user and can just stumble across things instead of having to rely on search.
Self censorship is huge. I admire dissidents living under authoritarian regimes who are brave enough to share their stories, whether they remain there or escape.
https://m.weibo.cn/search?containerid=231522type%3D1%26t%3D1...