Racialized Misinformation, Correction and Black-Asian Solidarity on Social Media

• In Event: Misinformation and Marginalization

Abstract

Rationale:
A well-functioning democracy needs an informed and just society. To advance the field of political communication, scholars have argued for studying race and racism as central concepts, rather than as an afterthought. While research on mis/disinformation has grown drastically in the field of political communication, scholars argue that the current research assumes the universality of mis/disinformation and rarely addresses how mis/disinformation differently harms marginalized communities and functions to maintain and reproduce existing power structures, especially White supremacy (Kuo & Marwick, 2021; Nguyễn et al., 2022; Reddi et al., 2021). This reflects the lack of attention to race in the field of political communication in general (Freelon et al., 2023).
This article examines the weaponized trope of “Black-on-Asian crime” that fuels information that misrepresents and misinterprets facts about anti-Asian violence. We put framing theory and theories of racial triangulation and racial solidarity in conversation with research on misinformation and correction. Studying types of messages in social media discussion about anti-Asian violence, we identify (1) the “Black-on-Asian crime” frame, which portrays Black people as violence perpetrators and Asian people as violence victims; under this frame, we identify a prominent piece of anti-Black misinformation that is factually inaccurate about data on perpetrators of anti-Asian violence. We also identify (2) a counter-frame that directly challenges, critiques, and questions the schema of Black perpetrators vs. Asian victims; under this counter-frame, we identify factual correction of above misinformation. Finally, we identify (3) a solidarity frame, which views Black people and Asian people as having shared struggles, common goals and interests, and unity when it comes to violence. We map how frequent each type of message is across three social media platforms (Twitter, Reddit, YouTube), and ask how these messages are used together in discussions of anti-Asian violence.

Methods and preliminary findings:
We collected posts and comments on Twitter (n = 162,009), Reddit (n = 32,266), and YouTube (n = 2,198) from Brandwatch, a social listening tool. The time window was between March 2020 and March 2023. Messages using keywords pertaining to Black-Asian relationship in violence were collected. Given the need to identify complex constructs in a large corpus, we use supervised machine learning to deductively identify messages. Two human coders first label a subset of messages (n = 2000) to filter out content irrelevant to the topic and to code for the presence or absence (1 or 0) of the discourses. Human coders met frequently during the past two months, resolving coding discrepancies and refining the codebook. The human labeled data is used to train three machine learning algorithms: Random Forest, SVM, and word embeddings. F1-scores, recall, and precision are calculated to evaluate algorithm performance.
We observe prevalent occurrences of “Black-on-Asian crime” frame across the three social media platforms, a substantial proportion of which is misinformation. The counter frame and misinformation correction, while less frequent, constitute a visible subset in our data. While the “Black-on-Asian crime” frame does co-occur with the counter frame, the solidarity frame is disconnected from the other two frames and is the least frequent.

Implications for the political communication scholarship:
Messages sowing racial conflicts are one of the main challenges democratic societies face in maintaining the health of communication ecosystems (Freelon et al., 2022). Combining computational tools with a critical lens on racialized misinformation pertaining to two minoritized communities, this article is the first study to our knowledge to systematically examine how social media discussions frame Black-Asian relationship in violence and information credibility in such discussions. Our preliminary finding also points to the existence of efforts that counter the weaponized trope of “Black-on-Asian” crime and mitigate the harm. Centering relationships and solidarity-building between minoritized groups is crucial for dismantling White supremacy and opens up theoretical space that bridges across lines of political communication research on framing, stereotyping, racial solidarity, and misinformation.

Authors

• Jianing Li, Rutgers University

• Aya Diab

• Joshua M. Scacco, University of South Florida