In the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, unsubstantiated rumors and blatant lies are circulating widely in the immigrant community. Heading into this year’s midterm elections, it’s happening again, but with an insidious twist, researchers say. With little resistance from social media companies, they target audiences in more languages, on more topics and on more digital platforms.
In recent weeks, posts exaggerating the impact of inflation have been directed at Americans in Latin American countries crippled by poor economic management. According to Zignal of the research group, a conspiracy theory circulated in August about the Internal Revenue Service’s plans for a “shadow army” caused mentions of “Ejército IRS” to spike alongside “IRS army” in English.
Misinformation about mail-in ballots, school curricula and hate crimes swirling in Chinese on Twitter, YouTube and WeChat will “dangerously affect” Asian-American voters, who are growing as a political force this year. advocacy groups said. Asian Americans promoting justice.
Nick Nguyen, co-founder of Viet Fact Check, a group that provides explanations for misinformation circulating among Vietnamese-Americans, said: “This is where a lack of fluent English can make a population vulnerable.”
Viet Fact Check is one of a growing group of groups trying to contextualize and debunk false online narratives written in languages other than English. 6 months old Spanish service Factchequeado under investigation inaccurate translationthe manipulated image and misleadingly edited video regarding Search for Mar-a-Lago Chairman Nancy Pelosi visit to taiwanDesifacts, which focuses on the South Asian American community, has begun publishing explanations and explanations on topics such as: immigration When student debt relief February in Hindi, Bengali and Tamil.
But multilingual fact-checkers say they can’t keep up with the lies that are flooding online. to do more work in other languages.
2022 midterm elections
With the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the November 8 general election.
Tamoa Calzadilla, Managing Editor of Factchequeado and former Head of Fact Checking at Univision, said: “It’s frustrating because we’re trying to do something and we need support from the platform. We’re doing our job, but big tech can do more.”
Social media companies say they moderate and fact-check content in many languages. TikTok uses over 70 languages, and Meta, which owns Facebook, uses over 60. According to YouTube, over 20,000 people have reviewed and removed misinformation, including in languages such as Mandarin and Spanish. TikTok said there are thousands. Both companies declined to disclose how many employees work in languages other than English.
TikTok has translated the app’s intermediate information hub into over 45 languages. Twitter has a similar election center available in English and Spanish that exposes disinformation and “before you impersonate” prompts in a variety of languages. It has invested in initiatives such as a fact-checking service in Spanish, which it says will display voting-related notifications in both English and a second language based on user activity.
Both companies also cite broader improvements. According to Meta, the Spanish misinformation prediction model in the US is now performing on par with the English model, significantly increasing the amount of Spanish content sent to fact checkers for review. Twitter says its newly redesigned contextual labels, which translate based on the user’s language preference, have helped reduce engagement with misinformation. According to YouTube, information panels are now displayed in different languages for certain search results and videos. It also highlights content from vetted non-English news sources based on the user’s language preferences and search queries, the company said.
But researchers are worried about the impact of non-English misinformation on upcoming votes, saying lies and rumors in other languages continue to permeate.a The report was released on Monday 40 Spanish-language videos from the watchdog group Media Matters found 40 Spanish-language videos on YouTube. The videos contained misinformation about US elections, including the erroneous belief that fraudulent ballots were being sent to the US from China and Mexico.
Some disinformation experts, along with some elected officials, are calling for more action and transparency on social platforms.
This year, the Congressional Hispanic caucuses pushed Meta, TikTok, YouTube and Twitter. Meeting with top executives Discuss the spread of misinformation in Spanish. YouTube has made available her CEO Susan Wojcicki. TikTok and Twitter sent other executives. The caucuses and Meta said they were unable to schedule a meeting and Meta planned to submit a written update instead.
Pointer’s international fact-checking network open letter A YouTube post in January explained how misinformation on the platform easily flowed across borders. Researchers say the same story often appears on different sites in different countries, then cross-pollinated in feedback loops to appear more believable. As such, immigrants are more likely to trust conspiracy theories put forth by both their Salvadoran mothers and San Francisco friends.
Misinformation can also cause what researchers call platform jumping. That is, it can appear in English on peripheral services like Truth Social or Gab, then appear in another language or with misleading translations attached to more mainstream sites.
The Alethea Group, which helps businesses fight misinformation, recently examined seven Colombia-based YouTube channels that targeted conservative Spanish speakers who live in or have ties to the United States. seems to be targeted. The researchers found that channels took false or misleading stories from conservative or foreign state media, repeated them on YouTube in Spanish, and sometimes directed viewers to platforms like Twitter and Telegram, where they were translated. At times, channel operators tried to monetize their videos through ads or requests for donations and subscriptions.
Althea claims that one account with more than 300,000 subscribers cites the existing unsubstantiated narrative that the FBI deliberately planted documents in Mar-a-Lago to trap former President Donald J. Trump. I discovered that it was repurposed and translated. One video was titled “S4LE LA V3RDAD” instead of “sale la verdad” (Truth Revealed). Alethea researchers believe it may have been a potential attempt to evade YouTube moderators. Other researchers found that accounts previously terminated by the platform for violating disinformation guidelines were reborn under different aliases.
Dominik A. Stecula, an assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University and an immigrant from Poland, said one of the reasons for the spread of multilingual misinformation online was the slow decline of local ethnic media dealing with community issues. I think that’s what I did.
“People don’t want to pay for content, and as a result many of these institutions are falling apart,” Stecula said. “They will be replaced by guys from Arizona with high-definition cameras and microphones.”
Pointing out how moderation is complicated by cultural nuances and diverse communication preferences, Stecula said immigrants from Asia tend to prefer WhatsApp, while people from Poland are often drawn to Facebook. explained.
Some experts are skeptical that all multilingual misinformation can be removed and promote other ways to limit its spread.Twitter last year tested the functionality This allowed some users in the US, South Korea and Australia to flag the tweet as misleading.
Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, head of strategy at South Florida consulting firm We Are Más, estimates that tens of thousands of people follow the Spanish-language Telegram channel that promotes the QAnon conspiracy theory. She said she learned about one group of hers with nearly 8,000 subscribers from a Colombian-American hair stylist.
She said such groups were “very smart to make sure the message was tailored based on culture and subculture.” A symbol that looks like a raised fistThis can represent hope and solidarity for young people born in the United States while reminding older immigrants of left-wing Latin American dictatorships. Merging words, calling President Biden “El Lagartiya” (Lizard) and describing his party as “Demoniocratas” (Devil-Democrat).
“It’s not just about misinformation and disinformation. We also have a responsibility to understand that words and symbols have different meanings than other communities,” said Perez Verdia. “It doesn’t matter if you’re from Vietnam or Colombia. Most people see the political prism of our country through the political prism of their own country.”