John Oliver has covered the topic of misinformation plenty of times before on Last Week Tonight, from vaccine myths to coronavirus conspiracies — and on Sunday, he returned to it once again.
This time the focus was the spread of misinformation among non-English speaking communities, something spotlighted recently by the revelation of how little time Facebook spends moderating content outside the U.S.
Oliver went on to break down examples of misinformation in diaspora communities, from Vietnamese Americans turning to YouTube due to a lack of credible news sources airing in Vietnamese, to the memes spreading on private messaging apps like WhatsApp and WeChat.
“A key problem right now is that many communities don’t have the same fact-checking resources that English-speaking ones do,” Oliver concluded.
“Beyond that, there needs to be public pressure on platforms to do something about all forms of misinformation, whether they are in English or not. Because a whole lot depends on this.”
Oh, and in case anyone needs a shorthand way of telling a relative that they just shared some misinformation, Oliver’s team also came up with a collection of “Good Morning”-style memes and videos with a twist, all of which are free to download now.
