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 has translated political news articles from English to Vietnamese in what she sees as her fight against misinformation.

“I feel responsible for my elderly Vietnamese community,” Bui says. She worries that her community is vulnerable to “being misled by fake news, by misinformation news, by fraud.”

Bui said that 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 spreading false information about former President Donald Trump, 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.”

New research shows exactly how communities of color are being targeted by “bad information.” Experts say community members like Bui are the front line in defending against disinformation targeting Asian and Latinx Americans in today’s information battleground, especially ahead of the 2024 election.

‘Deliberate manipulation’

“Will the 2024 elections take place?”

“There will be a new pandemic, or there will be a new disease to promote mail-in voting.”

“Democrats are failing to secure the US southern border so that illegal immigrants can vote for them in US elections.”

These are just some of the false narratives Asian and Latino voters are grappling with in a crucial election year. As communities of color form a significant voting bloc heading into November, Asian and Latino Americans specifically are the fastest-growing groups of eligible voters in 2024, according to Pew Research. They also face a similar problem: language barriers that often deny them access to reliable information.

“One in three Asian Americans has limited English proficiency, meaning they cannot use certain English language resources,” Jenny Liu, policy manager of misinformation and disinformation at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, told Scripps News.

“So when it comes to something like voting,” Liu adds, “if they can’t go to verified or reliable news sources to get that information, they will unfortunately turn to alternative sources and media.”

According to Liu, false narratives about elections in Asian American communities often start in English, but then go through a “misinformation factory.”

“Usually a few days later it gets translated into Vietnamese, for example. And then it ends up on YouTube, or someone talks about it in a video, and then it ends up on a Facebook post,” she says.

Misinformation also starts as a familiar story, a tale or rumor that 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 said. “That’s something called the global control narrative that we’re seeing more and more of. It usually has to do with the United Nations or the World Economic Forum. It’s kind of tied to QAnon.”

“The stories opened a window for people to accept other misinformation that they might have seen,” Braga continued. “That opened a window for people to believe, for example, that people are using vaccines to control us or putting microchips in the vaccines.”

RELATED STORY | Trump Shares AI Footage of Fake Taylor Swift Endorsement

Both Braga and Liu say issues such as health, immigration and voting rights will be discussed in the run-up to the 2024 elections.

According to Liu, there is “deliberate manipulation” behind the false claims, such as that “a new pandemic or a new disease will emerge to promote mail-in voting.”

This false claim creates a gateway for future disinformation about voter fraud, Liu says. “So public health meets elections meets this idea of ​​fraud in the middle.”

Another false narrative: the story that illegal immigrants are being allowed into the country so they can vote in the next election.

“Immigration is a big topic that we see before every election,” Liu says, but now “it’s also being used to connect it to the idea of ​​voting.”

A similar narrative was uncovered in Latino communities by recent polling results from DDIA in partnership with YouGov. The false claims include that Democrats encourage non-citizen voting and that vaccines are a form of population control supported by elites and big business.

“What we found is that the majority of Latinos are not sure if the things they see are true or false. So there’s a lot of skepticism and uncertainty,” Braga said. “There’s also a lot of familiarity. So people recognize these false statements and stories, but there’s still no certainty about whether these things are true or false.”

According to the DDIA survey results, Hispanic-dominant Latinos express greater uncertainty and are less likely to reject false claims they encounter. Moreover, Braga says, Latinos who “tend to encounter and believe false information the most are actually the people who are very interested in politics.”

“Unfortunately, these platforms are not very good at policing misinformation in English, but they are much worse at policing content that is not in English.”

Even if false information in English goes through a cycle of fact-checking, chances are good that the translated version (whether Vietnamese or Spanish) will not go through that process.

A spokesperson for Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, told Scripps News that the company has built the largest global fact-checking network of any platform, and that its arsenal of fact-checkers includes nearly 100 third-party groups that review viral disinformation in more than 60 languages.

YouTube boasts of the “careful systems” it has in place to determine what constitutes “potentially harmful misinformation.” The platform combats misinformation by promoting “quality information from authoritative sources.”

Yet Facebook, YouTube and other major social media platforms are being criticized by fact-checking groups for their inadequate response to misinformation. The criticism comes as content moderation tools, teams and metrics continue to disappear and misinformation campaigns grow more sophisticated by the day.

Both Liu and Braga emphasize that Asian and Latin American communities are not more susceptible to false information, but rather are targeted.

“So it’s not that we as a whole are more vulnerable or more naive than other groups,” Braga says.

“Ultimately, there are really systemic factors that are causing our community members to believe certain conspiracy theories and be locked into these information vacuums.”

RELATED STORY | Russia is counting on unsuspecting Americans to spread disinformation about the election, US officials say

‘Information Navigators’

“We have information gaps that are being filled with incorrect information from parties who understand that we are looking for accurate information,” Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, founder of strategic communications agency We Are Más, told Scripps News.

“How do we fill the gaps that are currently being filled by myths and disinformation from malicious actors who want to convince these individuals to cast their vote, confuse their vote, or ensure that they may stay home?” she asks.

“Information navigators.”

Information navigators, or trusted messengers, emerged from a pilot project led by researchers at the Information Futures Lab at Brown University’s School of Public Health. The project revealed the “urgent need for quality information” in South Florida communities.

“We trust them more than any influencer,” said Pérez-Verdía, a researcher at the Information Futures Lab who helped lead the pilot.

These messengers, like Bui, are critical as more Americans encounter political content through social media.

“If I can help at least one person understand what’s really going on in American politics, then my wish that I’ve done my job will be fulfilled,” Bui said.

Although Bui plans to put her microphone away soon, she plans to continue translating news at least through November, when an estimated 15 million Asian Americans and more than 36 million Latinos will become eligible to vote.

“Because everything depends on it,” she says. “Our democracy, our freedom, our money too. Everything depends on this election.”