‘Pre-bunking’ Covid misinfo from her childhood bedroom

Hello everyone,

Like many of us, Leezel Tanglao thought that Covid was going to disappear as quickly as it arrived. Working as a reporter in New York City, she was sent home for a couple of weeks, the office shuttered while people tried to understand what was happening. 

It was when she saw tents being put up in Central Park to treat people sick with the virus that she realised this wasn’t going to be over with quickly. A conversation with a friend who’s a doctor added to her fears about what could happen. Without any close family in NYC, her mind was made up – she needed to get out of New York and back to her family in California. 

“It had been so long since living at home,” she remembers. “It was a weird kind of like déjà vu, and I'm sure a lot of folks that I knew were also feeling the same way.” Thrust back into the heart of her Filipino family, she found herself in the familiar role of IT helpdesk and fixer-on-demand. 

“Ultimately, as a child of immigrants, you are the de facto translator,” she says. “And every time I go home for the holidays or periodic visits, there would be something wrong, for example, with their cable or their TV, they would wait for me to fix it rather than calling the company themselves.” 

Seeing how her mum, aunts and uncles, in their 70s and 80s, struggled to get to grips with the internet and smartphones got her really concerned – especially as Covid mis- and disinformation started to spread as fast as coronavirus itself.

In 2019, Leezel was a part of the Filipino Young Leaders Program (FYLPRO), a network to advance the Philippines and Filipino people through advocacy and expertise. She worked with her cohorts to create a helpdesk. They started with a Q&A based on frequently asked questions they sourced from the community. They translated them into Tagalog, the most widely spoken Filipino language, and launched within six months of Covid taking hold. The site, Tayo, translates to “us” in Tagalog/Filipino. It has since published more than 500 Q&A articles (you can read more on it here).

“I would describe what we did as ‘pre-bunking’”, says Leezel –  trying to get ahead and have ready answers for the questions that were likely to come up from the community, and to stop false narratives from taking hold. They focused on the most vulnerable, including seniors and frontline workers, and people who were unemployed – to help connect them to social services and government resources. 

They worked to meet people “where they’re at”. Research shows that Filipinos are among the people that spend most time on social media, compared to other nationalities. Half of Filipinos get political news from the internet, including Facebook. So Leezel and her colleagues made sure that they had an active presence on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and X.

When the first Covid-19 vaccines started becoming available in the US, Leezel and colleagues began enlisting medical and public health experts as well as Filipino community groups to conduct webinars explaining the science behind the jabs. “You can’t just give someone a link to the [Centers for Disease Control], they’re not going to read that,” she says, adding that they had to culturally tailor the experience to their audiences. 

“We ran webinars almost every week, at the weekend, because it was at the height of the pandemic and no one was going anywhere anyway,” she says. 

“Because we were a multidisciplinary group, we had doctors, attorneys, technologists. And as a journalist, I would say that if you want to do community, true community engagement, this is the way you do it.”

The webinars used culturally-relevant references to Filipino food and traditional social activities, providing basic information about media literacy and encouraging vaccine uptake. In one example, they used breakfast ingredients as analogies for Covid vaccine components. (Is anyone else feeling peckish?)

There was also a deeper level of connection and cultural resonance that Leezel and her colleagues wanted to tap into with their work, to really try and engage their fellows. 

“Culturally, there is a term called kapwa, and it's like this kind of collective, collectivist kind of energy you get by really thinking about the whole versus individuals.” 

As one site describes it:

Our history and culture as Filipinos is layered and complex. Our native land, indigenous heritage and diverse culture has endured centuries of oppression from colonization, occupation, political instability, capitalist oppression, systemic corruption and fragile democracies.

We have been divided by political, socioeconomic, racial and geographic lines.

What remains is kapwa.

This sense of self identity is important for both Filipinos in the Philippines and those in the diaspora. 

“That doesn't always get talked about,” says Leezel. “So it helps to be around other Filipino Americans, because they all were going through the same thing.” Leezel saw how when people’s physical networks, like going to church or meeting friends, were disrupted by Covid, loneliness started to set in.

“I think it just lives within, kind of our psyche, but to see it kind of play out in real time was really eye-opening for a lot of folks,” she says. “It really emphasised all the work that goes into building community and what that means.”

From its October 2020 launch to July 2022, tayohelp.com had nearly 9,000 unique users  visit the website. The top search enquiries included “mental health” and “Covid-19”. While 50% of users were from the US, Tayo also saw 43% of traffic originate from the Philippines itself, beyond the site’s original target audience.

And it’s still going strong. It’s been expanded to cover other topics, including business, immigration and legal issues.

“Every Sunday I fire up the zoom and whoever is there, is there,” says Leezel. “We continue to try to keep this going after four years. 

“The reason why is because we all found community where we didn't expect, and we're still doing it.” 

As Leezel’s work has shown, connection is everything when it comes to telling stories that people care about.

By meeting people where they are, giving them the facts told simply, and using language and ideas that resonate with individuals’ lives and cultures, Tayo really made a difference to people in such a tough time.

As ever, I want to hear your thoughts on this issue – drop me a line.

Until next time!

Lucy