Misinformation and the deepfakes polluting our media ecosystem are a known issue to much of the U.S. population. But this awareness does not always spread to immigrant communities who don’t speak English. We wanted to change this.
The Markup started by doing an information needs assessment with one community: Vietnamese people above the age of 50 in Oakland, California. We conducted a focus group interview with 30 people, did individual interviews, and analyzed the YouTube archive of one volunteer who donated her YouTube viewing history (17,000+ videos). We learned that many community members got their news on YouTube, and from specific influencers who translated sites like Newsmax and Breitbart into Vietnamese. Our first story focused on shedding light on what we found: For some immigrant communities, the only news that is accessible to them, is translated misinformation.
With this as our base, we set out to amplify existing community solutions and develop new resources that would equip the community with the ability to access better information.
We co-wrote a first person narrative with a 67-year-old Vietnamese grandmother, Bùi Như Mai, who shared her story as an oral history. Bùi started translating mainstream media, like the New York Times and the Atlantic, into Vietnamese because she was worried about the misinformation consumed by her community. Bùi has her own news segment on the YouTube channel of Vietnamese news publication Người Việt.
Our story was published in English and Vietnamese at The Markup and Vietnamese grassroots organization Viet Fact Check. Recently, we kicked off a new video series with Bùi: We wrote scripts about how Vietnamese folks can find better information and Bùi broadcasted it to her steady following on YouTube. We wanted to provide vital information where the Vietnamese community already was: On YouTube with a trusted voice.
We also wanted to give people actionable information on how to navigate misinformation with their families. Many children of immigrants have struggled to talk to their parents about the misinformation their parents have amplified. So our next story became a guide for all second generation immigrants on how to talk to their loved ones about misinformation, released just before the December holiday season when families are likely to gather in-person.
Finally, we started a workshop series with the Vietnamese elders that we featured in our first story. People had told us about a problem, so we worked to give solutions. We built two workshops. The first explained the main misinformation issues the community was facing and showcased tools like Google Translate for the community to use. It was service journalism delivered in person and in Vietnamese, and was received with excitement. A handful of Vietnamese community members installed the Google Translate app. The second workshop focused on explaining artificial intelligence and its capacity to create deepfakes, and how people can spot them. When we gave this workshop, none of the community members in the room had heard of artificial intelligence, so we broke the topic down for them.
