Communities of color are being targeted by "bad information" ahead of the 2024 election. Meet the community members working to make sure they get the truth. (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."
As new research shows exactly how communities of color are being targeted by "bad information," experts say community members like Bui make up a frontline defense against disinformation targeting Asian and Latino Americans on today's information battlefield – specifically ahead of the 2024 election.
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