Who Gets the Last Word? Election Disinformation in Immigrant Communities
South Asian Chronicle | By Nasreen Khan
Chinese, Indian, Filipino and Vietnamese immigrant communities are being fractured by the same fear-driven anti-immigrant disinformation, spread through trusted community networks and now amplified by artificial intelligence, according to a forthcoming report previewed at a national news briefing hosted by American Community Media (ACoM) on Friday, 23 October 2026. The session, titled Who Gets the Last Word? Election Disinformation in Immigrant Communities, brought together three mis- and disinformation specialists ahead of the November midterms to brief ethnic media reporters on how false narratives about voting and immigration status are reaching voters, and what newsrooms can do about it.
About the Briefing
Moderated by ACoM Associate Editor Pilar Marrero and opened by Sandy Close, the hour-long virtual briefing featured Cameron Hickey, CEO of the National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC), Jinxia Niu of the Chinese Digital Engagement project at Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), and Laura Zommer, co-founder and CEO of Factchequeado.
Divided by Design and Why It Matters to South Asian Readers
Niu’s presentation carried particular weight for South Asian readers. She previewed Divided by Design, a new CAA report examining how fear-based, anti-immigrant disinformation is deepening internal divisions specifically within Chinese, Indian, Filipino and Vietnamese communities across the country, splitting households along lines of legal status, class, religion, immigration history and national origin. CAA, a civil rights organisation founded in San Francisco in 1969, has tracked more than 600 pieces of Chinese-language disinformation and identified over 150 disinformation-linked social media accounts, with the ecosystem skewed heavily toward anti-democratic narratives.
Three Recurring Disinformation Themes
Niu outlined three recurring disinformation themes her team monitors. The first, election fraud pushed by pro-Trump, anti-CCP influencers, has shifted its centre of gravity over the past year from WeChat, where political content faces increasing censorship, to X, now the platform generating the highest engagement before claims circulate back into WeChat groups. The second, non-citizen voting disinformation, exploits a genuine cultural gap around identification requirements and becomes especially potent once it intersects with fear of immigration enforcement. She cited a real voter-registration software error in New Jersey that, once shared in Chinese-language WeChat and Xiaohongshu groups, caused widespread panic among naturalised citizens worried that even an accidental registration error could jeopardise their status. The third theme, partisan attacks painting Democrats as supporting open borders and weak law enforcement, closely mirrors a nearly identical flyer from the 2022 midterms, now regenerated with AI image tools for 2026.
Taiwan and Who Falls for Disinformation
Asked directly whether Taiwan is also a target of coordinated disinformation, Niu confirmed that CAA believes a coordinated, state-linked campaign is targeting Taiwan and said a fuller report would follow. She also noted a troubling finding from CAA’s community research: it is not only less educated or older community members who fall for disinformation. Highly educated, first-generation immigrants, including many with doctoral degrees in technical fields, are often just as susceptible, she said, both because they tend to spend more time on social media and because fact-checking is a specialised skill that advanced education in an unrelated field does not automatically confer.
Understanding the Problem
Hickey opened the briefing by laying out the basic vocabulary of the problem: misinformation that misleads regardless of intent, disinformation that is knowingly fabricated, conspiracy theories tied to a larger narrative, content stripped of context, and emotionally manipulative framing. He said two forces keep this content spreading, the attention economy that rewards whatever keeps users engaged, and cognitive bias, our tendency to trust what already matches our beliefs, illustrated by a recent rumour, since debunked, that a bombed Russian data centre had crippled bot-driven disinformation online.
SIFT and the Threats Facing This Election
To help reporters and readers evaluate claims, Hickey recommended SIFT, a four-step method developed by researcher Mike Caulfield: Stop before reacting, Investigate the source, Find better coverage elsewhere, and Trace the claim to its original context. He flagged two converging threats specific to this cycle: AI-generated images depicting immigration enforcement agents intimidating voters at polling sites, which are fabricated but already circulating on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, and genuine ICE presence near polling locations, which voter rights groups say is creating a real chilling effect on turnout among newly naturalised citizens. He also raised concern over the federal SAVE database, which the administration has used to flag tens of thousands of registered voters, including in California, as potential non-citizens, when many are in fact recently naturalised citizens whose records had simply not yet caught up.
AI Chatbots and Voter Research
New NCoC polling due for release shortly shows AI chatbot use for election research nearly doubling in two weeks, from 14 percent of eligible voters nationally to 25 percent, with usage among Hispanic voters running close to 30 percent, almost double the rate among non-Hispanic voters. Hickey urged reporters to produce clearly sourced articles answering the specific questions voters are typing into chatbots, since these systems are already pulling answers from whatever obscure sites happen to rank rather than from vetted journalism.
AI in Political Advertising
Laura Zommer of Factchequeado, which works to counter Spanish-language disinformation on behalf of more than 68 million Latinos in the United States through a network of 151 media and community partners, detailed how AI is reshaping this election cycle specifically. She cited Wesleyan Media Project research identifying at least 169 political ads using AI tools so far, representing roughly 80 million dollars in spending, of which 69 percent failed to disclose AI involvement to viewers. No federal disclosure law exists, she said, and while 31 states have passed their own rules, enforcement is inconsistent.
She pointed to University of California San Diego research showing 76 percent of Americans are concerned that AI-generated audio or video could influence the 2026 midterms, and shared striking findings from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which tested six major AI chatbots with identical election questions in English and Spanish. English-language answers were incomplete, outdated or incorrect three times in ten; the failure rate in Spanish rose to 45 percent, with notably fewer cited sources. In one case, Meta’s chatbot twice gave Spanish-language users the wrong midterm election date, 4 November instead of 3 November.
Which Voters Are Most Vulnerable
Answering a question from reporter Sandra Martinez about which age groups are most vulnerable, Zommer said the answer shifts depending on the topic and platform. Younger voters tend to spot manipulated framing more easily but often lack the pause to add context before sharing, while older voters struggle more with convincingly fabricated AI content. She added that what reliably changes behaviour, even when it does not change underlying belief, is clearly showing someone that a specific claim was false and that someone attempted to manipulate them, since no one wants to feel used.
Disinformation on Radio
Reporter Clavel Rangel asked how disinformation spreads differently through trusted radio hosts compared with social media, particularly in Spanish-language programming. Hickey pointed to VERDAD (verdad.app), a free tool built specifically to help journalists investigate mis- and disinformation circulating on Spanish-language radio. Participant Nancy Tran of Vietnamese Radio TNT added in the session chat that a comparable dynamic exists in Vietnamese-language media, where disinformation often frames Democrats as communists or socialists to exploit fear among refugees of communism, a pattern several participants agreed trusted ethnic outlets are uniquely positioned to counter.
Closing Message
Closing the briefing, Niu encouraged ethnic media outlets to subscribe to CAA’s PiYaoBa Substack newsletter and help amplify Divided by Design once it is published, noting the report and CAA’s fact-checking resources at justicepatch.org and piyaoba.org are freely available to share. Zommer confirmed Factchequeado will launch an interactive electoral rumours map next week and that all of its content, including bilingual English-Spanish pieces, remains free to republish or translate with credit. With the midterms days away, the panel’s shared message to ethnic media was clear: accurate, community-specific reporting, delivered before false narratives take hold, remains the most effective defence immigrant voters have.
Speaker Bios
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Cameron Hickey
CEO, National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) Cameron Hickey is the CEO of the National Conference on Citizenship. He is an award winning journalist and technologist who founded the Algorithmic Transparency Institute at NCoC to empower journalists, researchers, and civil society advocates to increase accountability for digital platforms. Prior to NCoC, Hickey led the Information Disorder Lab at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. As a journalist, he covered science and technology for PBS NewsHour and NOVA, where he won a News and Documentary Emmy Award and a Newhouse Mirror Award for his reporting. |
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Jinxia Niu
Program Manager, Chinese Digital Engagement, Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA) Jinxia Niu is the programme manager of the Chinese Digital Engagement project at Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), where she manages three WeChat accounts and the Chinese-language fact-checking website PiYaoBa. She has ten years of experience in Chinese media writing and editing, is the author of two technology and society books in Chinese, and was previously a visiting scholar at Stanford’s Peace Innovation Lab. |
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Laura Zommer
Co-Founder and CEO, Factchequeado Laura Zommer is the Co-Founder and CEO of Factchequeado. She received the Recognition of Excellence at the 2025 Gabo Award and the Maria Moors Cabot Prize Special Citation 2024. She is an Ashoka Fellow and was a Knight Fellow at the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) from 2022 until mid-2025. For over a decade she served as Executive Director of Chequeado, the first fact-checking organisation in the Global South, and she created LatamChequea, the first regional fact-checking network, bringing together more than 40 media organisations across 19 countries. She holds degrees in Communication and Law, teaches at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Universidad de San Andres, and has received numerous journalism awards, including the Gabriel Garcia Marquez Award for Innovation from the Fundacion Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericana in 2015. |
