Sending News Back Home: Misinformation Lost in Transnational Social Networks

Abstract

Prior research into misinformation has overwhelmingly concentrated on English-speaking communities. As a result, misinformation has proliferated, almost unchecked, in non-English contexts resulting in a dearth of understanding the structures and impact of misinformation among marginalized and immigrant communities. Through qualitative coding of social media data and a thematic inductive analysis inspired approach, we investigate how misinformation has proliferated through social media sites, such as Facebook, and the types of informational content, and specific misinformation narratives, that spread across the Vietnamese diasporic community during the 2020 U.S. Informed by the work of organizations such as Viet Fact Check, The Interpreter, and other community-led initiatives working to provide fact-checking and online media analysis in Vietnamese and English, we present and discuss salient misinformation narratives that spread throughout Vietnamese diasporic Facebook posts, fact-checking and misleading information patterns, and inter-platform networking activities. This work contributes contextual knowledge to researchers seeking to understand how to represent and include immigrant diasporic communities and their sociocultural contexts, within research on transnational misinformation around sociotechnical systems.