When misinformation in Chinese appears on US platforms such as YouTube or Facebook, activists say it appears to be less actively moderated than English content, a pattern that has also been documented for other communities in the US that use languages other than English, especially Spanish. While Meta and Twitter have both announced efforts to label misleading information in other languages, reports from whistleblowers and in the media suggest that moderation in languages other than English is lacking. Elena Hernandez, a YouTube spokesperson, says the platform’s moderation teams include people with Mandarin and Cantonese expertise. Meta did not respond to a request for comment; Twitter did not comment.
Individuals such as More Less and small grassroots groups try to fill the gaps but have limited resources. More established nonprofits carry weight, but often promote liberal causes and can be viewed as partisan and biased. Unlike those who work against disinformation spread in English, there is no out-of-the-box reporting from reliable news sites, fact-checking pages, or government publications to refer people to. Non-English language publications in the US, which often serve specific ethnic groups, generally lack the staff to cover politics in depth.
Misleading political messages in Chinese come from a variety of sources and include views from the left and right, although researchers report a sharp increase in far-right content since 2020. Well-funded media affiliated with the far right in the US such as the GTV Media Group and Epoch Media Group produce original but partisan content in Chinese. Other accounts sharing misinformation seem to be focused on monetizing clicks by translating the kind of extreme content that goes viral in English as well.
On YouTube, self-proclaimed newscasters have become a major source of news for some Chinese speakers in the US, with political hottakes often landing in misinformation, says Jenny L., who helps spot misinformation and misinformation for Asian Americans Advancing Justice, a nun for-profit organization in Washington, DC. She asked to remember her last name to avoid online harassment. “It’s pretty easy for them to get around the minimum moderation YouTube has for non-English content,” she says, including by avoiding certain words or using slang terms, for example, a word that sounds like the second character in Mandarin. word for vaccine.
None of the activists WIRED spoke to saw evidence of the Chinese government’s involvement in spreading election misinformation, although blogger More Less pointed out that some nationalists in China welcome anything that weakens American democracy.
As in English, Donald Trump currently dominates much of the American conversation on Chinese-language platforms about politics and the upcoming midterm elections. At a media briefing in September, CAA, the Mental Health Association for Chinese Communities, and APIAVote, a group seeking to engage Asian American and Pacific island communities in the political process, warned of trending falsehoods.
They include a story circulating on public WeChat channels that alleged that the FBI raid to retrieve government documents from Trump’s Florida home was orchestrated by the Biden administration to aid Democrats during the midterm elections. Some posts had a uniquely Chinese take, likening the FBI search to unauthorized raids on homes during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. In response, PiYaoBa published an article in Chinese with detailed context, corrections to the false information and links to reliable sources, albeit in English.
