Thread by @triciawang

I found out that my mother is being radicalized by Chinese Wechat & local Chinese American groups in California to either not vote at all or vote for Trump. During this quarantine she has a lot of time at home and she's been seeing a lot of misinfo

https://twitter.com/kenyatta/status/1313924099668873217

Everything she has said is the almost WORD FOR WORD the same things that I have heard other Chinese Americans say in my networks.

Their main issue is that the “next generation” won’t benefit from their hard work and that their children or grandchildren will fall behind if Democrats are in control cuz they’ll implement things like affirmative action & equality measures.

I too am super worried that Asian Americans are being radicalized & neutralized (to be rendered ineffective w/ their voting power) w/ fake news. Ironically, these are the same arguments that have been made against Asian Americans in the 1800s & all immigrants for the past decades

Is there a #quantificationbias happening with Asian American voters? Historically, this group has not been active voters, so there’s not as much quant data about them or research about them.

When Trump won, I remember many were shocked cuz they were going of analysis of “legit”#bigdata from @FiveThirtyEight .

Even @NateSilver538 said he screwed it up.

He called for a more rigorous approach and provided A LOT of great learnings in his reflections, BUT....

...the one thing he didn’t suggest that we do is gather #thickdata - get the qualitative data directly from people who we can understand the WHY behind the quant data.

Talk to any sociologist or anthropologist who actually spends time gathering #thickdata, esp from white Americans who were feeling marginalized and left out from the economic growth over the last few decades, and they would’ve told you that they thought Trump would win.

But people weren’t listening to ethnographic data that would link emotions to voting behavior cuz it wasn’t "big data." If it didn't come in form of quantitative numbers, it wasn't valuable or legit vox.com/2016/9/6/12803…

So here we are again, it’s 2020 - I can’t help but wonder what are we NOT seeing in the numbers every day when we look to the polls for signals on who will win. What's not being asked, who's not being polled, whose POVs are we not considering?

Tons of resources being put into mobilizing diff communities to vote, but are we effectively countering this strain of disinfo in APAI?

@aaldef @napaba @aaaj_alc @aaaj_aajc @ncapatweets @apiavote @nqapia @APALAnational @18millionrising @reappropriate @AAPIData @originalspin

Also has anyone had convos with your families this year about this topic?

And if you’ve been hearing this, has anything worked with your parents or family members?

I also want to note that this info is spreading within very hyperlocal groups. My mon joined several new email & WhatsApp groups in her town. It's not like this is disinfo spreading through international Wechat groups of Chinese people

The same rise we saw in mutual aid groups being created during the pandemic is also the same type of organizing structure for this disinfo - I wrote about this earlier a few months ago in Quartz qz.com/1873417/tricia…

Update - we chose the calmest, most patient person that my mother would trust in our family to talk to my mom - which meant it was not my brother or I. We chose my sister-in-law. And she explained to him why voting for Trump would hurt her and her grandchildren.

She has agreed to not vote for him, but she hasn't agreed to vote for Biden. She prefers to not vote right now because according to her, Kamala is the real candidate. Biden is going to die and Kamala is just using Biden as her ticket to becoming the Pres.

I will keep you all posted on what happens in our next family convos.

I urge all of us to talk to our parents. Within 6 months my mom went from never caring abt politics to being radicalized during the pandemic. And I only found out last night.

There is not enough news about this at all but I found two writers!

@kimmythepooh wrote this piece for @NBCNews nbcnews.com/news/asian-ame…

@kimmythepooh @NBCNews And this video piece by @meiying_5 gets straight to the question of why would Chinese Americans vote for Trump again especially after calling COVID the China virus?

latimes.com/politics/zumyx…

For more on the specific content that’s spreading in these online groups read @kenyatta’s post on this - he studies how emotions spread in online communities

https://twitter.com/kenyatta/status/1313924099668873217

Today she is saying that Kamala supports transgendered people using all the bathrooms, which means they will harass her grandchildren and therefore destroy the “next generation”.

She put Gavin Newsom in the same boat & yesterday signed a petition for him to resign

All this points to the platforms that perpetuate & encourage spread of misinfo. Algos are not neutral. They’re programmed to drive people into extreme emotions cuz that IS the biz model.

Read abt whistleblower Sophie Zhang’s work at Facebook on misinfo

buzzfeednews.com/article/craigs…