Mai Bui is not your average YouTuber.
The 67-year-old retired engineer rocks her granddaughter to sleep as she edits videos for a Vietnamese show called Người Việt. For the past seven years, she's translated political news articles from English to Vietnamese in what she considers her fight against false information.
"I feel that I have responsibility for my senior Vietnamese community," Bui says. She worries her community is vulnerable to getting "duped by fake news, by misinformation news, by fraud."
Bui said after the 2016 election, she noticed right wing propaganda being parroted by people in her community. Depressed by what she was reading online, she tuned out the news. But when her friends started to spread false information about former President Donald Trump, she said she started translating news for them, sharing stories in direct messages on Facebook before expanding to a larger Vietnamese community on YouTube.
"They want the real news," Bui says. "They want the good information."
As new research shows exactly how communities of color are being targeted by "bad information," experts say community members like Bui make up a frontline defense against disinformation targeting Asian and Latino Americans on today's information battlefield – specifically ahead of the 2024 election.
'Purposeful manipulation'
"Is the 2024 election going to happen?"
"There's going to be this new pandemic, or a new disease is going to be created in order to push mail-In ballots."
"Democrats are failing to secure the U.S. southern border in order to allow undocumented immigrants to vote for them in U.S. elections."
These are just a few of the false narratives Asian and Latino voters grapple with in a crucial election year. As communities of color make up a significant voting bloc heading into November, Asian and Latinos Americans specifically, make up the fastest growing groups of eligible 2024 voters, according to Pew Research. They also face a similar issue: language barriers that often block them from trustworthy information.
"One in three Asian Americans is limited English proficient, which means that they aren't able to use certain English language resources," Jenny Liu, a misinformation and disinformation policy manager at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, tells Scripps News.
"So when it comes to something like voting," Liu adds, "if they aren't able to go to verified or reputable news sources and get that information, they will then unfortunately turn to alternative sources and media."
False election-related narratives in Asian American communities typically start off in English before going through a "misinformation factory," Liu says.
"Usually a few days later, it then gets translated into Vietnamese, for example. And then it makes its way onto YouTube, or someone will talk about it in a video, and then it'll make its way onto a Facebook post," she says.
False information also starts off as a familiar narrative, a story or rumor someone has heard before, Roberta Braga, founder and executive director of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas, tells Scripps News.
"One of them, for example, was that elites are conspiring with media and social media to hide the truth from us," Braga says. "That's something called the global control narrative that we've seen spreading more and more. It usually has to do with the United Nations or the World Economic Forum. It's sort of affiliated with QAnon."
"The narratives opened up a window for people to accept other disinformation that they might see," Braga continues. "That opened a window for people to believe, for example, that people are using vaccines to keep us down or putting microchips in the vaccines."
RELATED STORY | Trump shares AI images of a fake Taylor Swift endorsement
Both Braga and Liu say an intersection of topics like health, immigration and voting are being pushed ahead of the 2024 election.
Liu says there is "purposeful manipulation" behind false claims like a "new pandemic or a new disease is going to be created in order to push mail-in ballots."
This false claim creates an entryway to future disinformation about ballot fraud, Liu says. "So public health meets elections meets in the middle of this idea of fraud."
Another false narrative, that undocumented immigrants are being let into the country so they can vote in the next election.
"Immigration is a big topic that we see ahead of any election," Liu says, but now "that's being weaponized to also intersect with this idea of voting."
Similar narrative was uncovered in Latino communities by recent survey results from DDIA in partnership with YouGov. The false claims included Democrats encourage non-citizen voting and vaccines are a form of population control supported by elites and large corporations.
"What we found is that the majority of Latinos are not sure if the things they're seeing are true or false. So there's a lot of skepticism and uncertainty," Braga says. "There's also a lot of familiarity. So people recognize these false statements and narratives, but there's still not sure one way or the other if these things are true or false."
According to DDIA survey results, Latinos who are Spanish-dominant, show more uncertainty and are less inclined to dismiss the false claims they come across. Additionally, Braga says, Latinos who "tend to both come across and believe the false information the most are actually the people who are very interested in politics."
"Unfortunately, these platforms are not very good at fact checking misinformation in English, but they're much worse when it comes to content that's not in English."
Even when false information goes through a cycle of fact checking in English, chances are the translated version — whether that's Vietnamese or Spanish — won't go through the same process.
A spokesperson for Meta, Facebook and Instagram's parent company, told Scripps News the company has built the largest global fact-checking network of any platform and its arsenal of fact checkers span nearly 100 third-party groups reviewing viral misinformation in over 60 languages.
YouTube boasts the "careful systems" the platform has set up to help determine what is "potentially harmful misinformation." The platform plays offense against misinformation by elevating "quality information from authoritative sources."
Still, Facebook, YouTube and other major social media platforms are being called out by fact checking groups for their insufficient response to misinformation. These critiques come as content moderation tools, teams and metrics continue to disappear and misinformation campaigns grow in sophistication by the day.
Both Liu and Braga stress that Asian and Latino communities aren't more susceptible to false information — they are targeted.
"And so it's not the case that we are as whole, more vulnerable or gullible than other groups," Braga says. "
"Ultimately there are really systemic factors that feed into why our community members are believing certain conspiracy theories and being siloed in these information vacuums."
RELATED STORY | Russia is relying on unwitting Americans to spread election disinformation, US officials say
'Information Navigators'
"We have these voids of information being filled with inaccurate information from actors who understand that we are looking for accurate information to be given to us," Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, founder of the strategic communications agency We Are Más, tells Scripps News.
"How do we fill these voids that currently are filled with myths and disinformation by malicious actors that want to persuade these individuals either to suppress their vote, to confuse their vote, to ensure that maybe they stay at home?" she poses.
"Information navigators."
Information navigators, or trusted messengers, sprang from a pilot project led by researchers at the Information Futures Lab at Brown University's School of Public Health. The project revealed the "dire need of quality information" in South Florida communities.
"We trust them more than any influencer," Pérez-Verdía, a fellow at the Information Futures Lab who helped lead the pilot, says.
These messengers, like Bui, are crucial as more Americans come across political content while using social media.
"If I am at least helping one person to understand what is the real things happening in America politics now, it fulfills my wish that I've done my job," Bui says.
While Bui would like to soon retire her microphone, she plans to keep translating news at least until November where a projected 15 million Asian Americans and over 36 million Latinos are projected to be eligible to vote.
"Because everything depends on it," she says. "Our democracy, our freedom, our money too. Everything depends on this election."
