Journal. Plus a variety of compelling podcasts. Cspan now is available at the apple store and google play. Download it for free today. Cspan now, your front row seat to washington. Anytime, anywhere. We have more now from the net roots conversation in pittsburgh. This is just over an hour. Good morning, i am the research manager. We are the largest Voter Registration organization that is focused on let next voters in the country. We are one of the top Voter Registration others in the country. I am happy to be here to discuss how this affects let next voters. I am the research director. I we are a grass roots nonpartisan Voter Engagement organization. It serves the entire state of georgia. We are focused primarily on information that disenfranchises black voters. I am the Communications Associate at asia and Pacific Island are vote. It is the largest nonpartisan National Organization seeking to empower apis a apis. We do monitoring of narratives related to Voting Rights and narratives about our communities. I am excited to be part of this panel. This information usually lifts within our communities. Often times it is about our communities as well, which is an important distinction to make. It brings with it different problems. How do you see it in your role at your organization . We will start with rose. I really appreciate the question. I will start at a more macrolevel. I know my fellow panelists will start talk more about their communities. There are disinformation narratives about communities. Like all arab americans think x. There are disinformation narratives that Community Spread inside. Something i saw a lot was that latinx would say oh this candidate does not believe in voting. They are being used by bad actors to make it harder for people to vote and exercise their rights. So that is a huge problem and something we see across communities. This also becomes layered with other identities. For me, i see a lot of disinformation about the lgbtq community. It is layered on top of an area that is spread and communities of color. There has been a ton of narratives about lgbtq use, youth. It makes it difficult for people to live authentically online and to be able to understand what the facts are about candidates, about communities and about themselves. So it is a huge problem. It is one that we are working every day to try to combat. When we see disinformation, making sure that we are reporting factual information on either side. An understanding how politics online works. It is a major problem in something we have to address. That is an excellent question. It is one of the reasons i was excited to be part of this panel. Disinformation is not going away unfortunately. But communities of color deal with this information on two dimensions. We are dealing with information that threatens to disenfranchise our communities, depressed turnout, depressed support for democratic candidates. On the others, we are also the subject of disinformation. You might hear something about voter fraud, but that is very different from 5 million illegals voted in california. This is something that is spreading information disinformation about an election. We deal with that by dealing with the narrative of undocumented people and the disinformation about them voting and the danger opposes that it poses. But also from a contouring disinformation standpoint. We do a lot of research as a partnership with media matters and they help us monitor these types of narratives online. How it is being spread and who are these networks a bad actors. There is another part of the organization that deals with what it means for the people in the community. To the undocumented people who might become targets. You cannot tell by looking at us which ones are undocumented people. It puts our entire community at risk. It is an important point to make. We talked about some information about covid. I will let kyle speak to this. Bringing in racial undertones that really hurt the asianamerican community. I will let him speak to that. It is an component that is often missing from the discussion about disinformation. We are not just worried about people switching sides. It is not just about the information is wrong. What happens a lot in the black community is that the disinformation suppresses their willingness to go vote. We have seen a lot of bad actors planting the idea that nothing is happening. In georgia in 2028 we had a record turnout. In 2020 we had a record turnout. A lot of the disinformation taps into those feelings about our disenfranchisement in this country, but at the same time we still have to celebrate the wins that we have come whether it was everything we want it or not. Part of our mission is making sure we are positioning ourselves as truth tellers. A lot of what we do is make sure people know they can come to us for the facts. We want to continue being the trusted messenger, but also make sure we are telling the truth whether anybody asked us to or not. We infuse repetitious facts into our media posts. We are going to tell you when, where and how to vote. We have also launched a website where you can put in your address and get all the information that you need because we are trying to make sure people know that they know where to go, they feel prepared. Hopefully, when they hear disinformation, they will stop and say maybe i should look into it. We are sensitive to the fact that disinformation not just tears people the wrong way but also will encourage them to stay at home and we do not want that. Piggybacking off of what everyone else was saying, in aapi communities, it is very much the same. It is being spread throughout our communities. We see stuff about covid19 and all of that being a hoax and recipes to make a medicine at home. We see disinformation about things as crazy as she went on qanon. We see stuff about our communities and we have seen what it has led to, with the ongoing pandemic we saw how it has led to annotation attacks. Antiasian attacks. Disinformation also leads to real life violence. It really can lead to the end of somebodys life. What we do at aapi vote as we do our best to monitor these things. It is difficult to have the capacity to do all the work that needs to be done to actually combat all there is online. And so, while we do our best to see everything that is going on and push it out to our partners, it is not enough. We need more support financially and we need more research to be able to do what needs to be done. I think everybody on the panel would agree that an added layer is the fact that people who look like us will also post push this type of disinformation and be used by bad actors. When we talk about people like michelle milken talking about the asianamerican community, that makes combating disinformation even more difficult when people can point to somebody and say oh they are an asianamerican and they agree with my far right point. That is a very difficult thing. That is why we are here today. Also. Thank you. That is a great segue. What are your main challenges in your work to combat this information. Rose, we can start with you. We view ourselves as a connective tissue between a lot of activism, organized and on the ground and the halls of congress where we know some of this can change. That is what my role is. That is how i view myself in the space. There are a lot of challenges that come with that. An example that comes to mind specifically is how these online disinformation narratives that are so racially targeted have real life offline harms. Our group recently put out research that 55 of people of color are afraid to go to their polling place. That is unacceptable. That rate is far higher than white americans. That research came out two weeks ago. We are fighting a fight up online disinformation and what happens when that moves offline. When i was working in the 2020 elections, i saw false narratives that ice was at polling places. We sent people to check to make sure voters felt safe. Ice was not there. That is a huge problem and a huge challenge. The second challenge is that this information happens in so many different online forms. We work with the group called the Disinformation Defense League. I urge all of you if you are part of a nonprofit to look it up and join our work. It is run by women and people of color primarily. We are working to help people have the tools to move back to the halls of congress. There are gaps between people who have met meet spaces for people like us. It is a huge challenge and a huge problem. The first step to fixing it is getting these activist communities together. To join in solidarity. Make sure everybody feel safe at a polling place, that everybody has the correct information and then bring that to the halls of congress and federal agencies. That is the right approach. It has to be a cross racial movement. Here is one of the first steps. I am very proud to be here with my fellow colleagues. Some of the Biggest Challenges we face with the Latinx Community is nonenglish information. I am including the lgbtq community. Some of the biggest issues we face are really accountability on the part of the platforms because nonenglish disinformation is oftentimes underreported. It goes under the radar. There are a lot of news outlets. This needs to be a part of the conversation. Especially when we talk about how our federal agencies dealing with this information. That should always include nonenglish disinformation. It really flew under the radar for too long. It was part of the reason we established the latino disinformation lab. Any media people out there who are listening, there are experts that have been doing this for two years. We can speak to that with a good deal of authority and show you what is going on in nonenglish disinformation. Spanish language in particular. Holding platforms accountable for that can be very difficult. You will hear things like we took down the one million accounts that were spreading disinformation. But we need more specific difficulty specificity. How many of those were spanish, how many of those were man drink . That is not information that it we are getting right now. Another challenge we face is that there are closed Networks Like whatsapp. You can look on facebook and twitter and see the spread of disinformation, but people take it into their private chats and it is difficult to infiltrate those channels and connect with those people and say that is actually not true. People grab this content and take it to those private networks from the big platforms. That is why accountability is so important. People do not go into whatsapp and start creating stuff. They go into the big platforms and to get and bring get there. Another problem is that none of our organizations were founded to deal with disinformation. It is something we have had to take on. By that i mean divert resources to deal with this because we cannot avoid it. Everybody has limited resources to deal with this and that is a challenge. We did a workshop yesterday and we had so many people who were happy we included free and lowcost alternatives to tracking disinformation because a lot of people do not have the funding to do that kind of work. It has been so critical to partner with people like that Disinformation Defense League and media matters who do that kind of stuff fulltime. We do not have the capacity to tackle every disinformation narrative. We count on our partners. We do not have a division that deals strictly with the policy aspects of this. We count on partners like free press to help us navigate that landscape so it is critical that when dealing with disinformation, people understand the limitations of organizations like ours. We were not built to counter disinformation fulltime. Our mission is to engage latinx voters, to bring them out to the polls. We have limitations and challenges. For us, i can definitely agree with the challenges that have already been presented. One of our main knee many challenges is that we are routinely a topic of disinformation ourselves as a organization. We have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to combat disinformation about us and what we do. A great example was in 2020 during a press conference of our governor and secretary of state, they set our names and said we were the purveyors of Voter Registration fraud. So we had to stop what we were doing, which was actually engage in voters to say we do everything legal. But what we were able to do in that instance was use the heightened Media Attention to tell our story better. It takes a lot of capacity for our digital and our research and all of our other departments to be able to stop what they are doing to address or combat consistent lies about our project and what were are doing. Another challenges challenge is funding. A lot of funders are interested in organizations like ours in election years. Funding is not always consistent , particularly in off years. But we work yearround no matter what because our goal is to engage our communities and make sure they are sustained in their positions to hold our politicians accountable. One think that is important for all of us is educating our partners, our funders about the importance of our work, particularly disinformation yearround. Our voters care about what is happening, but they do not always have the information they need. It is our job to make sure we show them how their vote matters. And we need funding for that. I can pretty much agree with everything that was already said. We were not necessarily designed in the beginning to combat and research disinformation but it is something we had to take on because it is such a pressing issue. They are being presented with so many false narratives. We have seen lots of Voter Suppression narratives. We have seen a lot of stuff that is completely false. That is a very difficult challenge for us. We need more support to be able to do this work, to understand the spread of disinformation narratives, also better coordination. At least in the Aapi Community, there are groups who were doing this work, but because of the lack of Financial Support and lack of attention to the issue, there is not a lot of coordination among groups. And that is definitely changing and we are at the forefront of trying to get these different groups together. It is just not an issue that people are thinking about. There is not enough capacity for us to really come together. I think another big issue especially for the Aapi Community is the fact that we are so diverse. We have over 50 languages when you break it down. When you try to understand that disinformation is spreading through all of those different communities, it is difficult. You have to understand the language of all these different groups. It varies among communities. It is a difficult thing to even understand the level of what is happening across the board. Another thing is we were across so many different platforms too. A lot of Indian Americans happen to be on whatsapp. We have to have rides on a lot of different places. These platforms tend to have closed groups. It is a lot of manpower and requires to have our in a lot of different places. One other thing i want to mention is nonenglish disinformation, a lot of Media Companies are not paying attention to it. Disinformation in any other language other than english is not typically taken down. When it is not in english, it will probably stay up. That is another big challenge. Thank you. Rose, this question is for you. How was nonenglish disinformation distinct from disinformation in english . First of all, nonenglish disinformation is going to be different. Spanish language will be different than disinformation in arabic. One of the main differences is how english content is moderated somewhat. Platforms are investing more in english content moderation than in nonenglish. The platforms should be funding 30 nonenglish disinformation efforts and moderation efforts proportionally to how they are funding it in english. This makes a difference for people of color who may or may not be getting most of their information in other languages. There was a Facebook Post that had disgusting disinformation that is almost unrepeatable. We asked facebook to read remove the post in english and they did within the week. We then found it in spanish and it took facebook 11 months to remove it. It is inexcusable. We hosted a roundtable on this issue with senator us online. Senators online. The platforms have not given us the real answers. We do not know what content moderation looks like. We do not even know if those who are moderating this even have rights. We do not know if they are contractors or if they are fulltime employees. I imagine if they are fulltime employees, all the platforms would be running to tell us. So now we have a problem. We have a lack of moderation and a lack of funding for that moderation. And the moderation is likely being done by people of color who are underpaid. It is a major issue. We know there are disparate outcomes in terms of moderation. We are bringing this to the federal trade commission. I am more than happy to talk about this later with anybody because we need to hear your stories. We need you in policy conversations. We need people of color to show up with us. We need people who do not speak english or for whom english is a second language. Right now, it is not given enough attention because we have not been given a seat at those tables. Thank you, rose. Liz, rose just mentioned holding them accountable is a big thing. You mentioned it as well. My question is what is your organization doing to address disinformation in the Latinx Community . Specifically nonenglish disinformation . I want to touch on something rose said. We do messy people of color at these tables. If you are at these tables and you do not see us, bring this with you. Call us. We want to come. You need to speak up and say that disinformation impacts communities of color. I know people who can come and speak. I know people who do media monitoring. We can come and talk. If you are sitting at one of these tables and you do not see us, please connect because we are ready to come and join you at these tables. To answer your question come up we are doing several things. I have mentioned the disinformation lab. Part of it was leveraging media matters 15 years of monitoring right wing online. They stepped up and ramped up a program to look at Spanish Language disinformation. It is invaluable to us to get that content on a weekly basis. It is difficult to be looking at this content all the time. But that is only one component. What is being said and who is spreading the disinformation. The next piece of that is doing research into who was listening to this and who is vulnerable . As a research manager, i do research for the disinformation lab. We mapped out susceptibility to disinformation. I can show you how to access themes models in the voter files. We can show you what the landscape looks like as far as who was vulnerable to disinformation. We mapped out susceptibility to this information and that is really key. That tells us who is listening and it is important. All of us here have limited resources. It does not do us any good to spend money targeting people like me who are not listening to that kind of narrative. It does not serve an organization to spend money targeting people like us. We are helping you be more efficient with your limited resources. The third piece of that is Strategic Communication. We are producing content as well. There is a content deficit on our side. Trolls do not sleep and neither should you. They do not stop. They are out there putting out disinformation at all hours of the day and night. They do not step on election day either. After 20 20, they ramped up. After the 2020 election, they ramped up. They will not stop on election day and you cannot either. You have to own your organizations mission. Keep being that incredible voice in your community. Keep creating that content. The people who do not quite believe all the false narratives , but they kind of wonder if it is true, you want to beat what they find when they go on their Commuters Computers and search. So keep producing it. I know it is labor intensive. I know there was a cost in terms of manhours. Get your content out there. Go on podcasts. Do panels like this. Right in your ride in your local papers. The final piece is the Strategic Communication piece. We have gone out there and gotten stories from our community and our own voices, unscripted. We make content using their voice. We share those stories about different policies and the ways the policies impact our communities. It is easy to lose the wins. You have to really celebrate your wins. We do that by talking to people about how those little and big wins. We just had big wins on Gun Legislation and climate. We are talking to people about how that impacts their daytoday lives. When the disinformation is out there, so are we. Thank you. As liz mentioned, whenever we do talk to communities, we are interrupting the disinformation. We know the facts are not as impactful when individuals and communities negotiate truth. How can we improve the ways the way we do it in our community . One of the things we are doing is leveraging technology. We are working with the Software Company to create a tip line. We have two disinformation associates. They both live in the atlanta area and we service the entire state of georgia so we need to make sure we are not just in groups that include the people in the metro. We need to make sure we are capturing what is being said in the rural areas of georgia as well. With this tip line, we are recruiting every day people to screenshot what they are seeing so that we can then either message to it or figure out how we can contact people. We work closely with our Digital Department and we also work in the field to make sure scripts are addressing anything we know people are talking about in the community. We also want to make sure that we are talking to people oneonone on social media so that we can go ahead and say that is not true, here are some more information. We have a website with questions that people have that has more information, the truth about whatever it is and a link to a source that is credible. So if they want to learn more, it is accessible to them. The other thing we are doing. In 2021, we did research to understand what two black voters consider powerful . The first thing that grabbed us is that it is not electing black politicians. It is seeing that their vote resulted in resources being deployed to their community. It is actually seeing change. We have a thank georgette campaign to highlight those things that have happened a thank you Georgia Campaign to highlight those things that have happened. For example, there was a farmers relief bill that targeted farmers of color in georgia and other states as well. We need our communities to know this happened and it would not have happened had you not turned out to vote. So we are trying to make sure that we are amplifying the truth. And also, we are trying to have social media posts that highlight every day georgians about how the policy impacted their life. We are going against this narrative that you vote and nothing happens. We want to acknowledge, celebrate, reinforce that what we did in 2020 and 2021 was impactful and we should continue doing it. Thank you. What does the infrastructure for combating disinformation in aapi communities look like . It is relatively fragmented. I want to emphasize that. That is not because there is not a united front. There was efforts to change it. There is a group that is the part of the disinformation defense leak league. It is one of the first efforts to bring different organizations together to share research, to coordinate messaging, to create deliverables. We released a 50 page report on the context of why Asian American disinformation is unique. If anybody wants to look at that , it is on the website. The fact is that even though there are these efforts changing, there was just not the capacity. I want to give a shout out to the organizations that are doing that work. They are actively pushing out messaging on apps where a lot of Chinese Americans are being exposed to disinformation. They are putting out counter messaging. There is also Indian American impact to puts out content related to issues that are impacting Indian Americans. There was a group called Equality Labs that do work for south asian related issues. I want to emphasize that there are all these groups and there are efforts to bring us all together, but because there is such a lack of funding and capacity. The infrastructure is not as quite built as it is for other communities. That is changing but the conversation needs to shift to the fact that this is an issue that is affecting aapi and there needs to be more of a focus on that. What is the lesson you have learned through your work that you want people to know and implement in their own work . That is a good question. I will start. I think what is so important when we are looking at this Information Online is that we need to meet communities where they are. We have put together the susceptibility model that can help to do that. It is important that we keep doing this Community Grassroots work. It is really important that we are meeting people where they are and that we are empowering people to make their online experience their own. I work a lot in platform accountability and technology justice. And right now the Technology Companies are making it about us. Making it so our identities online or no longer our own. Are no longer our own. If you have the ability to connect your grassroots work so that we can all be a united front when we go to the halls of congress or the federal trade commission, that is one thing you can do that is extremely helpful. We need your voices. We need the voices of the grassroots of people who historically have not been invited into these conversations. We need you to meet people where you are at where they are at and bring them with you into the conversation. I try to do that in my work. We try to connect the grassroots with the policies to demystify the process. It is not up to companies to determine what our online experience is. It is up to us. It is more important now than ever to help make our experiences, to own our experiences online to make them our own. Thank you for all the work you do. You do a phenomenal job of demystifying the process. Every time i go to one of your briefings, i learned something. So thank you for everything you do. If you walk away with one thing that ive learned on the latina side is do not go chasing narratives. You cannot deal with all of the disinformation out there. We need you to be experts at the thing that you do. We need you to be great there what you do. I need rose to be amazing at the Technology Accountability policy stuff. I need renate to help me connect with black voters. I need kyle to be the trusted messenger that can connect me with aapi voters. Do not chase narratives. If something is not impacting your organization directly. If the attack is about your organizations credibility, there was a reason to respond there but otherwise do not chase narratives. Focus on being that credible voice in your community. So that when you speak your Community Members say they said it so it must be credible. We need to be a credible voice to our community. We need latinx voters to sit up and listen. We cannot focus on every type of disinformation unfortunately. That is our focus and we do it day in and day out. Shut out to our social media group who is out there every day creating a content that resonates with people. We will do it every day until election day and we will do it after the election. Be relentless in defendant your mission and being that credible voice to your community. I have a couple of things. The first is in the work itself. Do not make people feel stupid for believing the lies. We have to be compassionate and understand that disinformation is an organized, longterm battle. As we are talking to people, meet them where they are, be compassionate and give them the facts. The second thing is, it is important to have relationships with the media. Sometimes what happens is, people see a headline on twitter and twitter amplifies the disinformation. When we have relationships with the media, we can help influence them not to do that. We can also feed our stories. Be out there. Work with reporters on different stories. But also we have to support those independent media outlets, whether it is newspapers or radio, that are for communities of color. In a lot of places, those outlets need the support so that they can keep working and pushing out the truth for their communities. And finally, we need more tools. I know there are people out here who can build these things. It has been difficult for us to find a tool that is not aimed at brand management. Because we are not using it for brand management. In georgia, we were worried about a mass shooting around juneteenth. So we need the tools to be able to see what people are talking about and we do not want to spend 46,000 per year. If you are out there and do want to build a tool for nonprofits, let us know and we will support. There are five lessons i will quickly go over. The first one is something i think everyone said and that is working together is one of the most important things we can do. A lot of us have limited capacity. We do not have access to all of the different communities that are impacted. Push out good messaging is one of the most important things. Also, know your lane and your capacity. That goes into the whole working together. Know what your organization, what matters to your organization. Monitor that stuff. It probably does not make sense to you to monitor the disinformation about roe v. Wade, right . Another lesson is all yearround. This work needs to be happening 24 7. Not just the research, but also putting out good information. It is not always about disinformation. Oftentimes it is just about the lack of any information at all. Making sure you are going into those communities or you know where those spaces are online and you pushing out information, whether it is as simple as where to go to vote or how to get your covid vaccine. It is something that needs to be done all year round. Not just during election years. Another thing is how be a trusted messenger is important. We have to be the trusted messenger is to build the respect. You have to have a real conversation with yourself. You may not be seen as a trusted messenger. Some organizations might be seen as part of liberal indoctrination. Even if you are the expert in the issue, fewer viewed that way by the people that need to hear the counter message the most, it is probably important for you to go into the community and find somebody that people look to as the trusted messenger and work with them to get your message out. I heard a story from a partner based in southern california. There was a woman who runs a Small Business of delivering food to she would use her ability to push out messaging about covid19 vaccines and how that is safe to these people who may be susceptible to disinformation. She is not a political figure. She delivers food to the community. She was able to get these people vaccinated. That is a good example of finding someone that people trust to get your message out if you are the type of organization that might be seen as an enemy. That also goes to something else. Some people are far down the rabbit hole. The people to focus on our those who are conspiracy curious and may be not convinced about anything yet but have the ability to. Get to them before the bad actors do. That is why this work needs to be 24 7. Its something i refer to as inoculation. In disinformation terms its making sure people have good information and have access to reliable information before they are exposed to a bad narrative. They will be skeptical of the fact that maybe thats not true because i saw something else. That is important. One thing i want to end this question with, especially for apis and Asian Americans, you cannot research this information in our community a domestic lens. This information is 100 transnational. The politics of ones home country can impact the views and perspectives thousands of miles away. One important example is nationalism and right ring politics in the united states. Right wing death politics of the united states. Like hindu republican type groups. It can go as deep as that because they see the potential for that type of transnational partnership. I think thats important. You can just talk about api disinformation only thinking about the word american. Its something that needs to be looked up from an international perspective. Thank you. Thank you for being here and letting us know about disinformation. I will leave you with the term that renata said. Thats our tagline for today. Thank you all. [applause]