Preprint - Sending News Back Home: Analyzing the Spread of Misinformation between Vietnam and Diasporic Communities in the 2020 Election

Abstract

Prior research into misinformation has overwhelmingly concentrated on anglocentric, 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 how it spreads across Vietnamese diasporic communities within the U.S. and between the U.S. and Vietnam. 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, their sociocultural contexts, and transnational misinformation around sociotechnical systems.