Vietnamese Americans Mobilize for Biden (part 2)

Anna Nguyen

Vietnamese Americans Mobilize for Biden (part 1)

These past few months of political, economic, and sociocultural turbulence have emphatically underscored the importance of civic engagement on a local and national level. The COVID-19 pandemic presents unique obstacles to traditional voting practices and consequently reiterates the gravity of conducting fair elections through imminent threats of voter suppression. Remaining nonpartisan in a political context as polarizing as the one we are in now is difficult but not impossible. In a terrain of conflicting political interests, it is now more important than ever to be conscious about what kind of information one consumes.

Additionally, these moments of strife have pushed some Vietnamese-American community organizations to come to terms with how they contextualize their political agenda as a minority group. Groups like Viets4Biden leverage their position within the Vietnamese diaspora narrative to influence who their community members support, believe in, and vote for. My efforts in securing an interview with this organization led me to further contact with Viets For America, a platform launched by Vietnamese-Americans that is intended to serve a bilingual audience.

Dennis Hoang and Douglas Phung are the creators of and visionaries behind Viets For America, a media-based organization focused on delivering reliable and unbiased presidential candidate comparisons to the Vietnamese community. I took some time to chat with them about their experiences as Vietnamese-Americans, navigating the realm of misinformation at this time in our current political climate.

Responses are lightly edited for clarity.

———-

Anna Nguyen: Could you tell me about the origins of Viets for America?

Dennis Hoang: I’ll start. I would say that a common problem with Vietnamese-Americans is that our parents and relatives read and watch a lot of Vietnamese disinformation on Facebook and YouTube. This experience can be frustrating since people in this generation don’t know how to fact check, so we wanted to create something that could help them with that.

Before September 2020, there were very few reliable sources of Vietnamese news that were easy to find in both Vietnamese and English. We wanted to create something that was easy to look at, easy to navigate visually because that’s where older generations find their information right now, through memes and little visuals that they find on social media.

Douglas Phung: To add on to that, a lot of people in the older generation are targets for disinformation. There was an organization that had a $9.5 million budget that Facebook caught. They were just spreading fake news and conspiracy theories to the Vietnamese community, like fake accounts that were machine-learned, posting information just like rubbish.

DH: But Facebook caught that organization. It was called, and they literally spent 9.5 million dollars to spread this information. At the time, it was the most amount of money spent on ads to support a conspiracy theory group. It was pretty large and had a big impact on Vietnamese-Americans, but a lot of them didn’t know that.

AN: Is it just you two on the Viets For America team? Who else is working with you on this project?

DP: We started with the idea, but I mean, we’ve had a lot of help from other volunteers. A lot of our media comes from another volunteer, Phuong, and she makes a lot of our infographics. We couldn’t be doing this without her.

DH: Phuong is definitely a huge help to our team. We’ve known her through college, but she offered to help us a couple of weeks into the project. She’s the one who suggested the idea of making and she’s actually amazing at that. She’s been a huge help for us and I don’t think we’d be as successful without her.

DP: And there are other people too. We’ve met people from other networks, like PIVOT. They’ve been very helpful. And even people who donate to the organization. We were putting our money into the ads because there are so few players in the market. That means just a couple of dollars in the ads helps us get pretty far. But a little bit more money gives us a larger reach into bigger.

AN: Was there a significant reaction to the development of your organization within the Vietnamese community?

DH: It was kind of split, so I guess it depends. We were looking at many young millennials, and they loved it. They came from a similar situation as we did where a lot of their parents were falling for fake conspiracy theories. They understood the problem, and that crowd loved it. A lot of them offered to help by donating and sharing our content. A lot of Vietnamese activist groups loved us as well. As Doug mentioned, PIVOT loved it, but there’s also other groups called The Interpreter, Viet Fact Check, and Viet Activism. Vietnamese Boat People loved it, and they helped share our content. All of these organizations loved our project and were ready to support us.

We did see some problems or negative reactions from older generations. But at the same time, that was expected because a lot of conspiracy theories and disinformation came towards that group of people. So when they saw our information, they either appreciated the fact that we had factual information that was sourced, or they thought it was not correct like disinformation.

AN: What issues are on the Viets For America platform? How do you decide what kind of information you want to publish?

DP: A lot of times, we’ll see something that is trending and think “That is a really partisan take. It could be fake news.” Dennis and I will try to research it, and then we’ll try to put out a few useful tidbits of information that corrects the article or maybe gives more background information about where that source might have stemmed from.

We had a little infographic on the refugees coming to America, and before we had our article out and before Viet Fact Check was out there were articles from two years ago that said Biden was against Vietnamese refugees coming to America. I feel like that quote was taken out of context though, because if you look at the morality of the situation Biden was in at the time, you can see that he just wanted to get American troops out first as his number one priority. He didn’t want a blank check to extend the war. He wanted the war to end. So you just have to look at the timeline of everything to understand what was really going on.

DH: I also occasionally scroll through my mom’s Facebook feed to see what kind of content she’s reading. Sometimes she shares memes with me and I’m like “Okay this is totally not correct,” so those are the types of topics that I would put on our website too. We want to research why these ideas are not correct and put it on our website so we can share that with our family as well.

AN: In our turbulent and polarizing political climate today, how do you package your Biden/Trump candidate comparisons so that they’re reliable and unbiased?

DH: We thought the best way to go about that is to have a side-by-side comparison. Sometimes when organizations are just spilling facts, certain people will not see both sides of it. So we wanted to show both arguments in a T-chart side-by-side comparison. I think people agree with that because we have all these topics but some people don’t know what the stance is for Trump or what the stance is for Biden. I believe we do a good job of that by showing it side by side because then you can easily look at it.

DP: Anytime you’re summarizing something like this, choosing which fact to surface can introduce bias. But we’re trying our best to make sure that we accurately capture the situation at hand.

AN: Do you have a specific target audience? What does that demographic look like?

DH: We have different target audiences based on how we’re reaching them, but organically, we want to hit pretty much everyone. We want to hit the younger generation and the older generation at the same time, but for the younger people, our mission would be for them to be more educated and informed on different topics. We also want them to be informed about and know how to point out fake news. We hope to encourage them to speak to their relatives that are less informed, correct that disinformation when they come across it, and enable them to have challenging conversations with family and friends.

Paid advertising is super effective in reaching audiences that would not see your content. This is where we try to hit older generations that speak Vietnamese as their native language. I would say that would probably be about ages 45 and up. And for them, we want to help inform and educate them on different topics that they may be misinformed by, so that they can make the right decisions when they vote.

AN: Most of your candidate comparisons are bilingual. How do you balance the level of content published in Vietnamese with the level in English?

DH: I would say it depends on the platform. We try to do half and half, but I assume that a lot of our content is going to be a little more for English speakers. We do have ads running on the back-end that are more Vietnamese, however, and I would strictly send that over to Vietnamese people. I would say that we have a split with 55 percent of our content in English and 45 percent in Vietnamese. We still understand what they’re reading so share that with their family members.

AN: What impact do you want your organization to have on the Vietnamese-American community?

DP: We really want the younger hard conversations with their parents. We saw a Wong Fu short that really captures the idea of sitting down and talking about the current social movements that are going on right now. We want to capture that same sentiment with what we’re putting out.

DH: From an organizational standpoint, there are not too many Viet activist groups that are running paid advertising right now. That’s kind of a weird thing to talk about, but I think that it’s an underutilized tool. We just want to encourage more Viet activist groups to run paid advertising, because if you don’t run paid advertising, the audience that you reach consists of people who already agree with your content. But if you want to reach people that won’t originally see your content, you will need to run paid advertising in order to persuade, convince, educate, or inform people from other parties.

DP: That’s a really good point, Dennis.

AN: In a similar vein, what impact do you think the Vietnamese community has in terms of participation in national politics?

DP: Right now, we’re trying to be non-partisan but we know that the Vietnamese community is heavily pro-Trump. There are only 2.2 million Vietnamese Americans in America. And although about 1.5 million of those people are eligible to vote, we should remember that Florida   decided by 537 votes in the 2000 election. So we still want to make sure that our voices are heard and that our community is actively participating in America.

AN: That brings us to my last question for you today. Do we as Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Americans have a responsibility to participate in our democracy this election?

DH: Yeah, I would definitely say that we as Vietnamese-Americans have a responsibility to our democracy. The stereotype in Hollywood and media is that Asian-Americans are typically silent. We need to make our voices heard. The best way to do that is to go vote.