Stop Asian Hate

When I’m feeling bored, which, let’s face it, was a relentless state for the last few years, my favourite thing to do was to scroll through conspiracy theories; in particular, covid ones. My top picks so far are that the Covid-19 Vaccine Contains A Microchip, that DisneyPlus Released Covid In Time For Its Launch or that Cocaine Protects Against Covid-19. And it might be an isolation-induced cynicism, but nothing is funnier to me than seeing these ideas debunked and mocked online.

But what I wouldn't love is if I was being presented this information under the guise of reality. Because while I'm seeing this on BuzzFeed's “list of craziest conspiracies,” a lot of people are being told that these are facts and this puts them in serious danger.

We all know of the misinformation and fake news on social media these days - don’t worry, I’m not about to bore you with another speech on being careful and taking what you read with a grain of salt. But there’s a huge chunk of users who don’t know about misinformation- users who can’t speak English. 90% of facebook’s monthly users are based outside of the US and Canada but only 13% of the platform’s content monitoring is spent on those users - users who are being failed and endangered by the companies that advertise themselves as liberating.

For El Salvadorian immigrants, many turned to an unverified doctor on Facebook and Whatsapp, Maria Eugenia Barrientos, who told followers that covid-19 has a treatment and therefore vaccines are not necessary. She also claimed that whoever got the vaccine would die but in reality, her misinformation was what led to avoidable deaths.

This is a problem that hits close to home: not just our international neighbours, because Australia’s population is approximately 30% migrant-born. During 2020 and 2021 Australian Vietnamese communities were afflicted by a distinct absence of covid communications, and the result was the rise of King Radio, a Vietnamese YouTuber who is a radical covid conspiracist, who can only be compared with America’s Alex Jones. And Whilst Alex Jones, has been removed from YouTube for spreading misinformation,” King Radio is still going strong on the platform despite him literally saying ‘masks are killing people,’ which violates YouTube’s ban on claims that wearing a mask is dangerous.”

South Western Sydney is home to 800 000 people from over 90 different ethnic groups- which made it a unique challenge for communication during covid. Unfortunately, that challenge wasnt met and the area saw massive vaccination hesitancy due to misinformation. The number of covid deaths of people born overseas was nearly double the number of deaths of Australian-born people. People from Middle Eastern backgrounds had a death rate 15 times greater than those born in Australia. But, once local tv stations started translating the content, the vaccine rates rose exponentially. It’s become very clear that we must actively provide Covid-19 resources to non-English speakers.

Before we judge these people for relying on their communities and not sourcing other information, we have to consider that if we were to move to Vietnam, for instance, the first thing we would do is probably find some other English-speaking people to tell us what to do, where to live, what is safe and what is not. So, it’s not surprising that diasporas form because these communities have helped each other navigate the complexities of living in a foreign country and they rely on each other as sources of information. Thus, false information spreads faster in these communities simply because they are more willing to trust it.

Content moderation could be a solution- and its one that politicians seem to prefer because it means companies solving their own problems. American anti-vaxxer Alex Jones has been removed from youtube, Spotify has removed some Joe Rogan episodes. Facebook claims to support its features in 111 different languages, which on a surface level sounds pretty good. But another 31 widely spoken languages on Facebook do not have official support, and thus misinformation continues to be higher in non-English speaking diasporas online. In a country like Mexico, whose population overwhelmingly speaks Spanish, a covid google search presents its first 3 links entirely in English. It is concerning, and I would argue, racist, that information is so inaccessible to non-english speakers.

This is a symptom of a bigger problem: if content moderation is such a big problem in this area that can be scientifically debunked, imagine how much of a problem it is in terms of harassment and discrimination. Out of the 111 languages that Facebook supports, community standards that bar users from posting offensive material like hate speech are only translated in 41 languages and even worse, Automated tools for identifying hate speech work in just 30. Facebook might try and fail in a lot of cases in the US and Australia, but it seems like they don't even try in a lot of other parts of the world. Their “efforts” are nowhere near good enough.

But the responsibility isn't entirely on social media corporations because it would be unreasonable to expect them to take down every single piece of misinformation. And so, It needs to be more than just fact-checking on social media, we also need governments engaging with community leaders and translating official and verified information into all languages so that non-English speaking residents don't have to turn to unofficial sources. It can be hard to gather momentum for this kind of government work- English speaking people, and I hate to say I am guilty of this too, are very quick to make fun of these conspiracy theories and minimise their impact, but instead we should turn our critique on those producing misinformation, and the vacuum that allows it.

The COVID risk remains and we still have very real consequences as a result. Given, there is a new variant emerging and we can’t guarantee that even more varients won't form in the future, it is imperative that we act now, before its too late.

As someone with a Korean family, its concerning to see that my own family might not have the resources to get reliable information about covid. But for the present, I guess I can be grateful that no one in my family is at an anti-vax rally or doing cocaine to cure them from covid.

It was looking like it would be the beginning of a great decade to be Asian, with our culture having a real moment in the spotlight of mainstream western attention. 2018 saw the explosive success of ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ — the first Hollywood blockbuster with an all-Asian cast. More recently, the success of Parasite at the Oscars, and even the mainstream demand for foods like Kimchi and Boba seem to suggest that true multiculturalism is finally transitioning from aspiration to reality.

Being half-Asian myself, I was pretty excited to see the way that my mother’s culture has become more mainstream.

But before we could get too excited, disaster struck, disaster in the form of an unknown little illness — I’m talking, of course, about Coronavirus.

Coronavirus has obviously had a huge and tragic health and economic impact.

But we’ve also been affected by a different illness — one which might not kill us so directly but which is far more deeply rooted — more endemic — to the fabric of our society; The disease of racism and xenophobia.

At the beginning of the crisis, we saw a sharp increase in racist abuse directed at Asian-Australians. People refused to sit next to Asian people on public transport, Chinese restaurants lost revenue and racist memes trivialised the human tragedy in places like China and South Korea. This trend even influenced my peers with racist jokes about kicking ‘bat eaters’ out of the school being all too common in the schoolyard.

But, if Australia is supposed to be the ‘most successful multicultural country in the world’ why is its acceptance of Asian-Australians so flimsy and fragile?

It all comes down to the idea of the ‘model minority’. A term coined by American sociologists in the 1960s, who argued that Japanese Americans had been able to overcome racial discrimination by achieving academic, professional and financial success. Today, this idea is encapsulated by the stereotype that all Asians are straight-A students, who graduate with a 99.99 ATAR and become doctors. — that if we just work hard enough, we’ll be accepted by white society.

But, what COVID-19 has exposed is that the model minority is a myth. Because the moment that Asian people start to be perceived as anything less than ‘model’ — say, for instance, when they start getting sick — we become, once again, the ‘other’.

The good news is, we will eventually overcome Coronavirus. Unfortunately, anti-Asian racism has much more staying power. From the White Australia Policy to the era of Pauline Hanson — We have always been positioned as the ‘other’ in Australian society. Coronavirus didn’t change this — it just brought it to our attention again.

More recently, the Black Lives Matter movement has forced Australians to reflect on the ways in which our police force perpetuates violence against first nations people. Mainstream news media is finally starting to talk about racial profiling and police brutality, confronting just how flimsy the facade of Australian multiculturalism is.

Personally, I’ve been reflecting on the link between the racism Asian-Australians experience and the racist violence perpetrated against our Indigenous communities — and what’s become clear is that both are symptoms of white supremacy — a system where power and privilege always accrue disproportionately to white people.

The thing is, as Asian Australians, we can’t overcome this by buying into the promise of the model minority — no amount of top-tier ATARS or medical degrees will beat racism. Instead — we need to ally with other marginalised minorities and fight to end white supremacy altogether. Of course, don’t just fail all of your tests to prove a point —but there are things we can all do to start change from a grassroots level. Let’s start showing up to black lives matter protests, and supporting Indigenous Australians in their fight against police brutality. Let’s campaign and vote for anti-racist political candidates. Let’s use our privilege as a ‘model minority’ to fight for all people of colour. Because it’s only by banding together that we will be able to achieve genuinely anti-racist policy change on a broad scale- redirecting funding away from police, and more humanitarian refugee laws.

Let’s be honest, it’s been been a few rough years for everyone. But, by being forced to confront the myth of Australian multiculturalism, we’ve got an opportunity to build a new Australia that genuinely embraces difference and meaningfully rejects racism. And that’s an Australia we all can be proud of.