The Fight To Get It Right
With the support of activists, community groups are organizing efforts against pandemic misinformation and disinformation campaigns. Photo courtesy of Shutterstock
A new community of journalists and activists, armed with facts, is working to block a wave of COVID misinformation aimed at immigrant communities
Editor’s note: This article is drawn from the podcast “Getting It Right” featured by the immigration storytelling project, Feet In 2 Worlds.
Even at the start of the pandemic in early 2020, it was clear to Nicolás Ríos that immigrant communities in New York City were being inundated by a wave of misleading claims about the coronavirus on social media channels.
As audience editor at the online publication, Documented, Ríos already knew that immigrants were heavy users of messaging platforms like WhatsApp, which allow them to keep in touch with friends and family no matter where they are. But Ríos also knew that WhatsApp had also been used to circulate messages riddled with false information.
This is why Documented quickly asked its audience to send in suspicious messages they received, so journalists could record and run down the false information.
Recently, on “A Better Life?” – a podcast about the impact of Covid on immigrants – Ríos said the misleading “messages are inherently tied to the community” and amount to a manipulative disinformation campaign.
Listen to the Podcast
People who circulate the disinformation go to great lengths to make it more accessible in order to better manipulate their targets. The WhatsApp messages, Ríos noted, spread throughout the community because they were easy to understand.
They were “in Spanish, (and) had some local (slang),” he said. “It was more conversational” and the messages would come with “learn more” links that actually took users to pages full of advertisements. “The fake news had the purpose of sending people in need to a website, so this guy who (created the message) makes 10 cents per click.”
In Alabama, community activists are credited with countering misinformation and getting people vaccinated. Some 90% of Vietnamese-Americans had been vaccinated by June of 2021, compared to the overall Alabama vaccination rate of 34
The less-evil twin of disinformation is misinformation, or false information spread without awareness that it’s untrue. “Immigrants are particularly vulnerable to online misinformation,” said Catalina Jaramillo, a staff writer at FactCheck.org who investigates and corrects misleading COVID-19 information distributed in Spanish.
Stopping the flow
Because of all this, organizations around the country are now pushing back against the wave, using their own messaging based on scientifically sound facts about COVID-19:
Documented-NY created a centralized guide with basic explainers and resources for undocumented Spanish-speaking people in New York.
FactCheck.org translates its stories from English to Spanish and works in alliance with Univision’s El Detector misinformation monitoring project.
Another news outlet, Conecta Arizona, uses colorful graphics and online chats to bring accurate information about the virus to Spanish speakers in Arizona and Sonora, its neighboring state in Mexico.
One of the most successful efforts so far is led by Boat People SOS (BPSOS), Gulf Coast, an organization that works with the Vietnamese-American community in Alabama and Mississippi. In Alabama, some 90% of Vietnamese-Americans had been vaccinated by June of 2021, compared to the overall Alabama vaccination rate of 34%.
Daniel Le, branch manager of BPSOS Gulf Coast, credits the high vaccination rate to how the organization listens and responds to the community.
“Whatever information they receive or that they understand, it usually comes from us,” says Le. “We are the (ones) who gather critical information, translate (it) into Vietnamese, and then disseminate it to an outlet.” For BPSOS, dissemination of this information takes many forms, including flyers, visits to churches, and town hall-style meetings.
A tattered safety net
Even the United Nations has launched a campaign to stop the spread of Covid misinformation. Photo by Manuel Elías for the UN
Worsening the spread of false information is the slow-footed response of large social media platforms which appear to run a few steps behind fake news creators and disinformation campaigns.
According to a recent Nielsen report, Latinos spend more time on almost all social media platforms compared to the general population. But the content-filtering used by these platforms is dwarfed by waves of misinformation aimed at immigrant communities and non-English speakers. According to a 2020 study by the activist organization Avaaz, Facebook only detected 30% of misinformation in Spanish, compared to 70% of misinformation in English.
People in marginalized and immigrant communities “don’t trust a lot of people, so they’re in a lonely place,” Jaramillo said. “And that’s when predators can be more effective, because you don’t have someone to ask, or you could not read the media because you don’t understand the language.”
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Katelynn Laws is a Colombian-American writer and producer based in North Carolina. Her work focuses on the lives and experiences of Latinos living in the U.S. South.