Across the country, people of color are vulnerable to misinformation, with some players explicitly targeting communities of color to spread misinformation about issues including politics and elections. Asian American Pacific Islander advocacy groups have found that groups linked to conservatives, including Donald Trump’s political adviser Stephen Miller, are targeting AAPI voters with disinformation through campaign mailers and digital ads. According to the AAPIs for Civic Empowerment Education Fund, these ads, which claim that policies excluding Asian people are advancing, are meant to confuse and build fear in order to keep Asian American communities from voting.
The ads, which began in states with high Asian populations including California, Arizona, Michigan, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Texas, have been traced back to the America First Legal Foundation and Citizens for Sanity, both conservative organizations led by Miller and other former Trump administration staffers, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
While it's not clear whether the ads want to influence Asian Americans in specific districts or generally across the state, they target issues Asian voters care about.
“In my opinion it is to sway Asian American voters to more conservative, but also law and order candidates,” said Timmy Lu, executive director for AAPIs for Civic Empowerment Education Fund.
Wei Chen, an organizer in the Chinese American community who co-founded Pensylvannia’s Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance (or API PA), also noted that mailers from America First Legal were falsely claiming that the Biden administration discriminates against Asian Americans.
“Asian Americans, like many other communities of color and immigrant and refugee communities have had to fight through many barriers to vote — especially misinformation,” Chen said in an interview with The Intercept on Friday. “The ads are new; the tricks are not.”
The mailers are not new to the community and allegedly first appeared when crimes increased against the Asian community and were tied to then-President Trump referring to the novel coronavirus as “the Chinese virus” and “the kung flu.” In order to take the focus away from Trump’s language, the ads blamed Joe Biden for the rise in crimes, and used misleading headlines and text from right-wing news outlets to create a false narrative.
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“This kind of ad, the political rhetoric has a real-world impact and our Chinese community and Asian community have to deal with the consequences of racist fear-mongering that Trump and the Republicans and Fox News are putting out,” Chen said. “Exploiting the pain Republicans have caused our community by blaming Chinese people for Covid and stirring up violence, it’s such a loser’s move. It’s a miscalculation to think that Asian Americans won’t see through it,” he added.
Other APPI advocates including Helen Gym, a Philadelphia City Council member, told The Intercept that “these horrendous, race-baiting mailers,” are a part of several efforts to suppress the Asian American vote. “I think anything that does the race-baiting and the fear-mongering — ‘You’re not welcome, you don’t count’ — is always an attempt to dissuade, suppress, breed cynicism and fear,” she said.
She added that direct contact with voters from the community is how advocates are working to stop the spread of disinformation.
With the midterm elections approaching this week, several Asian Americans have also shared how platforms trusted by the community, including WeChat and Whats App, have also been used to spread misinformation.
These reports were supported by a study done at the University of Texas, GovTech reported. "We know that diaspora communities are a prime target for bad actors," said media engagement researcher Katlyn Glover. Glover noted that those who spread misinformation often target immigrant communities because they may not be familiar with how certain laws or protocols work. A common piece of misinformation being spread about tomorrow’s elections is that Election Day is on Wednesday, not Tuesday; as a result, those who may not be familiar with American election patterns could be misled.
Another example of misinformation targeting the Asian community GovTech mentioned is through groups that claim to be empowering. In 2016, a pro-Trump group called "The Chinese Voice of America" gained more than 32,000 followers in just a few months because many believed it was supporting the Asian voice or vote.
Similarly, groups that were created in the guise of supporting victims of hate crimes garnered followers only to spread misinformation about who was attacking Asian Americans. These right-wing-sponsored and made groups, which were popular during the Black Lives Matter protests, claimed AAPI community members were being attacked by Black and brown folks in order to create a divide and pin communities of color against each other.
RELATED STORY: Extremists are targeting AAPI communities with disinformation to pit them against other minorities
According to Daily Kos, anonymously run social media accounts, vloggers, and alternative news sites disseminated “powerful shock effect imagery” in the form of CCTV footage, graphic “photographs of bloodied Asian bodies,” and fabricated news stories to fearmonger against the Asian American community and not only drive a wedge between it and other communities of color but encourage AAPI folks to vote red.
"We've noticed that information that targets specific cultural values or specific concerns of communities is particularly powerful," Glover said. "These groups that were created to be nonpolitical turned political when misleading information was shared and triggered people's concerns."
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