Second-Generation Americans: What to Do When Loved Ones Are Sharing Misinformation

The Markup
Earlier this year a friend of mine, who is a second-generation Vietnamese American, told me she stopped talking to her mother. She was becoming more and more frustrated because her mother, an immigrant from Vietnam, kept bringing up pro-Trump conspiracy theories and had adopted racist views on immigrants.

Politics and social issues have been causing rifts between loved ones across generations for years. Whether it’s about former president Donald Trump, the Black Lives Matter movement, or the Israel–Hamas war, familial conflicts are exacerbated and sometimes even caused by the different ways people consume information on social platforms.

These disputes have hit Vietnamese immigrant families especially hard because of misinformation that’s passed around, according to researchers at the University of Washington and Duke University. MORE