More than 1/3 of Asian Americans have shared a political story that was later identified as fabricated, revealed a new report released by Asian Americans Advancing Justice. More startlingly, 29% of Asian Americans over the age of 45 have shared a news story that they knew was false information.
The report, titled Converging Exposures, Divergent Experiences, was created by AAJC, in partnership with researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania. Millennials, ages 29-44, made up the majority of respondents — 55% — while Gen Z made up 43%. Of the 2,000 respondents to the survey, only 2% of respondents were 45 and over. The researchers used the polling firm Qualtrics, which recruited respondents in online gaming platforms, thus skewing heavily towards younger males.
Hmong respondents — 32% — were most likely to knowingly share made-up news stories, followed by 29% of Pacific Islanders, and 22% of Native Hawaiians and Filipinos. Nineteen percent of Indians said they had knowingly shared misinformation, while 18% of Vietnamese and Koreans surveyed responded in a similar manner.
Chinese respondents were the least likely to have shared a news story they knew was made-up at the time: only 14% of those surveyed said they had willingly shared misinformation.
“Misinformation seems to be coming from all sources, where artificial intelligence is further kind of polluting how people access information,” said Jenny Liu, Senior Manager of Misinformation Policy, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, in an interview with American Community Media. “The onus is really falling to members of the community to keep themselves safe online, to be able to access information sources that they trust and vet.”
“So I think at a moment like this, it’s really important for in-language media, in-language … contextualized media that’s made by and for the communities,” said Liu, one of the authors of the study. “Because otherwise, there is the creation of information vacuums that then leads to the furtherance of misinformation, with nefarious actors coming in and filling those voids with falsehoods that cater to their own political agendas,” she said.
Conversely, Gen Z and Millennial respondents appeared to show a higher degree of concern about misinformation than older generations. “We did speculate that perhaps an element of this was worry about their older family members, parents, grandparents being exposed to misinformation,” said Liu.
While a lot of credence is given to news from “official sources,” older immigrants come to news with a healthy skepticism but not blanket distrust, she said, noting that in many Asian home countries, news comes only from government sources and is hardly ever challenged.
Gen Zs rely most typically on social media as their primary source of news, noted the report. There is little to no engagement within this age group for in-language/ethnic media. Millennials also did not cite Asian news among their primary sources, leaning instead on US news and social media.
Asian American activists are not relying on traditional news sources to send out their messaging, said Liu. “They have created their own ecosystems, with TikTok accounts, and podcasts, and finding different ways of reaching audiences. So short-form video is the way that a lot of people are consuming their news these days,” she said, adding that she also leans heavily to podcasts for her own news consumption.
More than 61% of Gen X reads or watches Asian news, but their primary source is US news, according to the report. “When they do read Asian news, they are looking for the stories that matter to them in a way that doesn’t rely on stereotypes,” said Liu. “Oftentimes we’ll see in broader mainstream publications, small things like people’s names being spelled wrong or errors that often occur when you are covering communities or covering stories from a perspective of an outsider.”
“So that’s why we always emphasize the importance of community media made for and by the community themselves, and really centering the lens that you bring to a story,” she said.
Liu advocated for more fiscal resources for Asian American media, in order to reach younger readers and viewers.
SUNITA SOHRABJI
ACoM Health Reporter Sunita Sohrabji is a veteran reporter, most recently covering the Indian American community for India-West newspaper. She has received 15 local and national awards for excellence in journalism.
