Conversations with Chinese and South Asian residents and new University of Texas research revealed how trusted community forums WeChat and WhatsApp can be used to spread misinformation about politics and elections.
"We know that diaspora communities are a prime target for bad actors," said media engagement researcher Katlyn Glover, who co-authored the University of Texas memo on the use of encrypted messaging apps.
The research included interviews with 40 Chinese and Indian community members in the Houston area.
The findings come ahead of election day on Nov. 8, when a growing number of Chinese and Indian residents are expected to cast ballots.
Over the past decade, more than 80,000 Chinese and Indian residents have moved to Fort Bend and Harris counties. During that time, the Chinese community grew 20 percent in Harris County and 86 percent in Fort Bend. The Indian population has increased by 49 percent in Harris and 100 percent in Fort Bend County, according to census data.
Additionally, than 117,000 Asian residents in Texas have been newly naturalized, making them eligible to vote, including 30,000 who immigrated from India, according to research from the University of California's U.S. Immigration Policy Center.
WeChat, the most popular instant messaging and social media app in China and among Chinese Americans, is becoming an increasingly important venue for both political discourse and misinformation regarding U.S. politics, according to the memo.
The platform now hosts over 1.48 million active monthly users in the United States.
In addition to private messaging, users also can access articles on public pages managed by content creators and Chinese media outlets. Users can share the information in group chats of up to 500 people or through the app's Facebook-like social-networking function.
Some of these public account managers are politically motivated. In 2016, for example, a pro-Trump account called "The Chinese Voice of America" garnered more than 32,000 followers in just a few months.
In the Houston area, some political influencers have turned resource-sharing chats — in which local parents discuss their kids' education, for example — into political spaces, according to Glover.
During the Black Lives Matters protests, for example, researchers saw a large amount of misleading content on WeChat that used fear-mongering tactics to make families feel unsafe, Glover said.
"We've noticed that information that targets specific cultural values or specific concerns of communities is particularly powerful," she said. "These groups that were created to be nonpolitical turned political when misleading information was shared and triggered people's concerns."
Local organizers added that despite the ever changing information technology space, a low level of civic engagement and the lack of accurate Mandarin-language materials remain the biggest hurdles to meaningful political participation for the more than 110,000 Chinese residents in Houston.
"The most prominent issue is their lack of interest in participating in U.S. politics in the first place," said Lin Chen, a program manager at the Chinese Community Center at Houston's Chinatown. "If we can't even educate them about the process and convince them to come out to vote, then all the efforts to combat election misinformation do not even have anything to do with them."
Some new Chinese immigrants do not have any experience with elections, which leads them to avoid politics altogether or believe that voting does not make a difference, Chen said. Language barriers also play a part as most mainstream American outlets and government departments do not translate their materials into Mandarin.
"We are not worried about the people who are already highly educated and have their own ways to access information. It is the rest of the community we have a hard time reaching out to," Chen said. "They don't know English well, and most of their social circles are limited to other Chinese immigrants. They can only get information from WeChat articles or word of mouth, and that's when inaccurate information comes into play."
Findings from the memo, as well as Houston Chronicle interviews with community members, found the direct messaging app WhatsApp was a popular tool for the Indian American community to share information on a host of topics: crime and safety, local and national political candidates, schools and education, news from India and other topics.
Siddeshwar Gubba, who works in insurance, said he is a part of 25 to 50 different WhatsApp group chats, where a number of discussions take place.
"We have speciality groups like, as an example, Tesla enthusiasts, solar panel infrastructure people, Hinduism groups and Americans for Hindus," Gubba said, including some politically-focused chats, such as one for Hindu American Republicans.
Gubba said he has pushed people in his groups to vote if they are U.S. citizens.
"I try to help them out, communicating to people, you know, 'Get out and have a voice. Do research and pick and choose and vote for people,'" he said.
Gubba said his many WhatsApp groups generally are filled with highly educated folks who tend not to spread misinformation, though sometimes hastily forwarded links are not legitimate. When that happens, he said, other people in the group intervene typically will intervene.
"Most of the time people come back and say, 'This is not true,'" Gubba said. He added that he generally saw WhatsApp as a more intimate form of social media and called it a "pond" of information, compared to Facebook, which he likened to an ocean.
Glover said because the app often is used among close circles of friends, using phone numbers, information shared on these group chats may be considered more trustworthy than it actually is.
" WhatsApp and WeChat are spaces for close friends and family and communities to talk," said Glover, "We trust our family, we trust our friends. So, we found that when information came from trusted networks, people were less likely to go and validate it from another source, or to double check it themselves."
Her research found that forwarding unchecked sources was particularly common, especially among older generations, so much so that younger community members had a special term to describe their parents' readiness to share bad information: " Whatsapp degree".
While the research memo did not address the Pakistani community, local advocates said that group also is vulnerable to political misinformation circulating on platforms like WhatsApp.
Muslim diaspora groups, such as Pakistani Americans, often view U.S. elections through the lens of global politics, according to Palwasha Sharwani, operations director of the Texas chapter of Emgage, a national nonprofit focusing on civic engagement for Muslim Americans.
Sharwani was born in Boston after her parents immigrated from Pakistan. Over the years, she noticed many in her community vote exclusively on foreign policy issues and only get their news from media sources coming from their home countries.
Those voters' isolation from the larger U.S. political landscape makes them susceptible to misinformation that reinforces their negative views of America's role in the Muslim world, she said.
"Our diaspora has always voted on foreign policy issues like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because it just is important to us," Sharwani said. "Political participation can wane if a voter from one of our diasporas doesn't trust the government anymore or think voting is futile as a result of the injustices that we continue to see happening in countries across the world."
For example, since April, Pakistan's ousted former Prime Minister Imran Khan openly has blamed the Biden administration for toppling his government through a conspiracy. The U.S. and Pakistan's military denied the allegation, but Khan's accusation still struck a chord with many Pakistani Americans, including Sharwani's mother.
"My mother now believes in the Big Lie and she believes that Trump won the 2020 election because she's just so angry with the Biden administration," Sharwani said. "It's hard to explain why what's happening in Pakistan should make people believe in far-right conspiracy here. But misinformation is a slippery slope, and this is just where it leads people to."
Much of the information about Pakistan's domestic politics, including inaccurate material, finds its way to the Houston area through such platforms as Facebook, WhatsApp, YouTube, even TikTok, according to Sharwani.
"It's like a storm," she said. "You have your media resources you lean on that's covering what's going on at home. You see what people are saying about U.S. politics in a WhatsApp group. You talk to people at your place of worship. And then if a politician is campaigning, you hear what they say. We are not being as attentive to the news we are consuming as we need to be."
To help alleviate the problem, the team at Emgage has spent months knocking on doors and passing out fliers about the November midterms. Sharwani said that the face-to-face approach, combined with close community ties, has made the work effective.
"Someone who knew us from when we were eight is going to trust our words over something strange they read on the internet," she said. "They can now flag the misinformation because we've said the opposite."
© 2022 the San Antonio Express-News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
