How Asian and Latino voters are being targeted by disinformation ahead of the 2024 election

Targeted misinformation on topics like health, immigration and voting are threatening communities of color, Pew Research shows.

Scripps News
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's translated political news articles from English to Vietnamese in what she considers her fight against false information.

"I feel that I have responsibility for my senior Vietnamese community," Bui says. She worries her community is vulnerable to getting "duped by fake news, by misinformation news, by fraud."

Bui said 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 to spread false information about former President Donald Trump, she said 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."

MORE

ADDITIONAL NEWS FROM THE INTEGRITY PROJECT

COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: How to Counter Misinformation from Russia and China

THE WASHINGTON POST: See Why AI Detection Tools Can Fail to Catch Election Deepfakes (Copy) (Copy) (Copy) (Copy)

GLOBAL DISINFORMATION INDEX: A Review of 2024 Summer Olympics Disinformation Narratives (Copy)