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Unsubstantiated rumors and outright falsehoods spread widely in immigrant communities before the presidential election in 2020. That is happening again in the run-up to this year’s midterm elections, researchers say, but this time accounts pushing misinformation are targeting audiences in more languages across more digital platforms, with scant resistance from social media companies.

In recent weeks, posts exaggerating the fallout from inflation have been aimed at Americans from Latin American countries that have been crippled by poor economic management. According to the advocacy group Asian Americans Advancing Justice, misinformation circulating in Chinese on Twitter, YouTube, and WeChat about mail-in ballots, school curricula, and hate crimes “has dangerous implications” this year for Asian American voters, who are growing as a political force.

“There’s definitely a hyper-targeting of messaging,” said Nick Nguyen, co-founder of Viet Fact Check, a group working to contextualize and debunk false online narratives circulating among Vietnamese Americans. “This is where a lack of English-language fluency can make populations vulnerable.”

But multilingual fact-checkers say they cannot keep pace with the deluge of falsehoods online. They have called on the big social media platforms, including Facebook and YouTube, to step up their efforts against the spread of misinformation in other languages.

The social media companies said they moderated content or provided fact-checks in many languages: more than 70 languages for TikTok, and more than 60 for Meta, which owns Facebook. YouTube said it had more than 20,000 people reviewing and removing misinformation, including in languages such as Mandarin and Spanish.

But researchers worry about the effect of non-English misinformation on the coming vote, saying that lies and rumors in other languages continue to seep through. A report from the watchdog group Media Matters found 40 Spanish-language videos on YouTube that advanced misinformation about U.S. elections, including the false notion that fraudulent ballots were coming into the U.S. from China and Mexico.

Dominik Stecula, an assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University, attributed the spread of multilingual misinformation online in part to the slow decline of local ethnic media outlets covering community issues. “People don’t want to pay for content, and as a result, a lot of these institutions are falling apart,” Stecula said.

Some experts, skeptical that all multilingual misinformation can be removed, push instead for other ways to limit amplification. Last year, Twitter tested a feature that allowed some users in the U.S., South Korea, and Australia to flag tweets as misleading.

Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, head of strategy at the consulting firm We Are Más, estimated that tens of thousands of people followed Spanish-language channels on Telegram that promote the QAnon conspiracy theory.

Pérez-Verdía said such groups have been “very smart to make sure the message is tailored based on culture and subculture,” sometimes exploiting symbols like the raised fist, which can represent hope and solidarity to younger people born in the U.S. while reminding older immigrants of leftist Latin American dictatorships. Posts have blended anti-communist sentiment with conspiratorial QAnon language, calling President Joe Biden “el Lagartija” (the Lizard) while describing his party as “Demoniocratas” (Demon-Democrats).

“It’s not only about misinformation or disinformation—there also needs to be a responsibility to understand that words and symbols mean different things to other communities,” Pérez-Verdía said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re from Vietnam or from Colombia—most people see the prism of the politics of our nation through the prism of the politics of theirs.”

from The Seattle Times (10/16/22)
Author: Hsu, Tiffany

 

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