Chinese Americans targeted with ‘misogynistic and insulting’ election misinformation

Rumors across various social media sites are magnified through translation and dissemination to other platforms

After Kamala Harris became the Democratic candidate, TikTok and Instagram saw the emergence of a particularly vicious kind of misinformation - that Harris stole someone's husband, specifically Willie Brown, a former mayor of San Francisco.

This is false. But these rumors were soon translated into Chinese and posted on X, with the language becoming even more inflammatory", according to the Chinese factchecking group PiYaoBa. One Chinese influencer, whose tweet garnered more than 60,000 views, translated stole a woman's husband" as mistress".