Exploring Disinformation Across Various Languages
This semester, students in HINDI 204 participated in a workshop called “Exploring Disinformation from a Multilingual Perspective: Fact, Rumors, and Lies about the Texas Power Crisis.” We participated along with other students who were studying Chinese, French, Italian, French, and Spanish to evaluate the factual accuracy articles written in their respective languages of study concerning the power outages in Texas this year. The aims of this workshop centered around exploring how disinformation spreads across multiple language, developing our skills in researching information in other languages, and applying the concepts of vertical and lateral reading to analyze articles.
In the workshop, we first convened all together to discuss in general terms how we should go about finding articles in our respective languages and analyze the articles. Here, our professors walked us through analyzing the articles by using vertical reading and lateral reading. In this context, vertical reading consisted of analyzing the information contained within the article itself, such as the title of the article, its translation into English, and what the article was about as well as its stance on what caused the Texas Power outage. The lateral reading component consisted of then doing more research to validate the claims of the article through checking if the author was reputable, if the news source was trustworthy or had any political biases, checking if the images used were honest and not manipulated, and checking the sources of that the author used to write the article.
After we went over that information, we broke off into breakout rooms according to what languages we were studying. In the Hindi group, the HINDI 204 students worked on performing the vertical reading and lateral reading analysis on two articles they found that were published in Hindi-language newspapers about the Texas power outages. In this process, we used tools such as Google’s reverse image search to check the validity of the images used in the article and we exercised our Hindi reading comprehension skills to understand the articles and see if they had any political bias.
Once all the individual language breakout groups had a chance to perform the analysis of their articles, we were all separated into breakout rooms that had a mix of individuals from different language classes. I was put in a group that had only Spanish language students along with myself and the Italian language class professor. In our group, we shared what we found about our articles with one another. I was intrigued to learn about the different types of publications that we sourced our articles from and the different approaches that each of the reporters we discussed had in covering the news. For example, I remember one of the Italian articles was essentially a translated version of an English article without much individual input from the reporter who translated it. I also recall the Italian and Spanish articles tending to have more political bias, whereas the Hindi-language articles we found did not have any overt political bias present in the coverage of the story. Through this discussion, we also saw that the articles with an obvious political bent tended to spread more disinformation and unsubstantiated claims than those articles that were more neutral.
Overall, the experience of participating in the workshop was really rewarding as I learned more about how to critically evaluate the news I consume and check if it is spreading disinformation. I also gained a chance to improve on my Hindi comprehension skills by having the chance to read articles that were published in actual Hindi-language newspapers that are published widely all across India and read daily by native Hindi speakers. I also had the chance to interact with students of other languages and learn from them through this workshop, so I thoroughly enjoyed the experience and everything I learned from the workshop.
Here is the link of podcasts:
https://sites.duke.edu/dukehindi/category/intermediate-hindi-204/
https://sites.duke.edu/fakenews/groups-and-worksheets/
This workshop was supported by Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and Duke Exploring Disinformation group.