She’s the grandma fighting disinformation

Hi everyone, 

Remember, remember the 5th of November… but what will we remember yesterday for? 

At time of send, it’s looking increasingly likely it’ll be the moment that US citizens voted Donald Trump into the White House for the second time. 

Of course, results are still coming in and nothing is certain yet. But it's looking likely that he’s danced into a second term – even with four criminal cases looming over him.

The US vote is, of course, just one of the elections taking place around the world this year. But it has an outsized effect and an outsized presence in the news cycle. Whether or not swing states or hanging chads fire up your engines, you’d have to be living under a rock not to have caught any coverage of America’s big day. Social media data shows it is taking up way more space in the online conversation than any other major 2024 election. The US population is about five times that of the UK, but the US election has been mentioned 20 times more often than the UK vote earlier this year.

I want to hone in on what lurks in that online chatter today. Eight years ago, Bùi Như Mai started to see fibs and falsehoods spreading among her Vietnamese-American community. So she put the granddaughter she was bouncing on her knee to one side (if only momentarily) and set the record straight. 

She didn’t know it yet, but Mai was setting out on a path that would lead her to become an online presenter, broadcasting to thousands every week. Not bad for a self-described “normal grandma” who’d never dreamed of working in journalism before! 

In just a second I’ll hand over to Mai, who I was lucky enough to speak to just recently. She’s less normal grandma and more super-nan if you ask me. It was inspiring to hear how the sheer strength of her conviction that people need to hear the truth spurred her into action. 

“My father loved to read. He would read three or four newspapers each day – not just news about Vietnam but about the news from all over the world. But he got glaucoma when I was young, which meant he couldn’t see. So I became his eyes on the world. Every day I would read the newspaper to him for two or three hours. He had such a passion for politics that we would always have long discussions about political matters, especially things in the US.

I was one of ‘the boat people’. The Communists took over South Vietnam in 1975 and it was pretty bad. Everyone tried to escape at that time, to get away from the regime. My parents wanted us to get out so in 1979 they paid a boat owner to take me and one of my brothers. We were on such a small boat in the big ocean. It was just luck that we we weren’t attacked or raped by Thai pirates [as happened to others] and survived long enough to be rescued by a merchant ship. I think that experience that made me strong, made me who I am.

When I first arrived in the US, I was 23 years old. My English was not that good but I read the newspapers. I lived with my brothers at that time and all of us had that passion for politics in our blood, so we would talk about it a lot. 

~ Having travelled first to Thailand and then to Canada before coming to the US, Mai made a life for herself in California. She went back to college, graduated, had a successful career as a software engineer and raised a family. Then, after the 2016 election, she noticed how her Vietnamese-American community struggled to access trustworthy news sources. ~

I was just a normal grandma until Trump came along. I was so mad with people I know just talking about how good his presidency is when I could see other things going on. I think any community, not just the Vietnamese community, gets very bad news from all kinds of sources on the internet. 

So I started translating news stories from The New York Times and The Washington Post – not just word for word but interpreting them into my own style – and posting them to Facebook just for my friends and family. People seemed to like it for some reason and encouraged me to post them publicly. I got a lot of threats from people and I lost some friends but I didn’t really care.

~ Mai caught the eye of Người Việt Channel, an online Vietnamese YouTube channel. After a few months of persuading, they brought a camera-shy Mai around to the idea of working with them. ~ 

It’s one of the rare Vietnamese channels that tries to give people credible information. I have my own programme, which I record myself and put out two or three times a week. When I started out, I didn’t have any experience like news anchors or any kind of journalist, I just learned day-by-day!

And I’m still grandma. Five days of the week I’m busy looking after my grandkids and cooking for my family. Often you can find me preparing translations with my granddaughter on my knee. Otherwise, all of the work that I’m doing, all of the videos you see, I do a lot of it at night. Sometimes I go way into the wee hours working on things! 

After two years, I have at least 10,000 people watch my YouTube and sometimes it’s almost 20,000. The more I translate the more they seem to like it. I usually do two programmes a week but it’s been extra busy in the run up to the election. I think it’s very important. And in every session I said okay, the most important thing we have to do is to go vote!

Everyone from the channel went to an election event the other week. And I couldn’t believe how popular I was! A lot of people knew I was there and, oh my god, they came and greeted me and took selfies with me and spoke to me. They would say things about how because of me they know more about credible news and good journalism. I feel honoured about that and proud of myself. 

This work encompasses my love of reading, my love of meeting people, my love of life – it’s my way of spreading my love to my people too. It’s very important to me that I was helpful for my community.  

I’m blessed for everything I have from this country. So I see what I do now as my way of paying back. When I started doing my translation I said, okay, this is to honour my father in the love of politics he gave me. Instead of reading to my father, I’m reading to the Vietnamese all over the world. Before, I was his eyes. Now, I’m their eyes.”

I find it reassuring to know that there are people like Mai out there, trying to pierce the fog of misinformation and give people the truth. I think they’re needed now as much as ever, wherever you are in the world and whoever’s in power. 

But perhaps they’ll be even more necessary if Donald Trump returns to the Oval Office. The Washington Post’s fact-checkers documented 30,573 false or misleading claims made by Trump during his last presidential term, an average of about 21 per day.

He recently claimed that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio were, amongst other things, eating people’s pets; an absurd statement that was immediately debunked by both the city’s Republican mayor and the state’s Republican governor. Whatever your politics, it’s hard to deny that Donald Trump plays fast and loose with the facts – it’d make “Honest Abe” Lincoln wince. 

Until next week,