Diaspora-Watch

About Us

Diaspora Watch is a community-led project with the goal of combatting the effects of mis and disinformation on social media in diaspora communities. We get at our goal using a multi-pronged approach.

First, making use of crowd sourced data donations, we get a sense of the information that various diaspora communities are being exposed to on Facebook. Using aggregated information, the members of the communities are informed on popular content being consumed.

Second, we provide the communities access to resources from journalists and fact checkers, our project aims to help reduce misinformation that targets diaspora communities, particularly during elections.

About Diaspora Watch

Diaspora communities are communities which have been in the United States, for any amount of time, including first and second generation immigrants and their counter parts in the countries they come from. Due to the growing importance of diaspora communities in voting outcomes, these communities have been a victim of targeted misinformation, particularly during elections. Even though they make up a significant portion of the electoral population, issues concerning these communities, particularly relevant to misinformation are not typically covered by mainstream media. This is in part due to the lack of access to data from these communities, and due to the lack of expert knowledge about these communities.

Diaspora watch is a project led by academics at Rutgers university in New Jersey, in collaboration with other academics (University of Massachussetts), non-profits (Meedan), and fact checking organizations (Factcheck.org/University of Pennsylvania). The project is funded by a grant by the National Science Foundation.

We are primarily focused on Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) diaspora communities -- specifically, we are interested in working with Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Philippino and Korean diaspora communities. We plan to extend our project to include LatinX commuinities in the near future.

Our project aims to provide a high level over view of information being consumed across the US by various diaspora communities, thus allowing the users to be informed on any targeted disinformation they may be subject to. On top of that, our project, for the first time, provides access to fact-checking and journalism resources to these communities, which are usually under served. By collaborating directly with the communities, we are able to give a voice to the marginalized communities, whose voice is never heard in the main stream.

No personal information (except those shared by Facebook) is collected as part of this project. Only the facebook pages liked by a user and the groups they are part of are collected, aggregated and analyzed. Only groups/pages with a certain number of members will be considered in our analysis. Our app does not collect or share any personal information and our research has been approved by the Institutional Review Board at Rutgers University. Please refer to our privacy policy for additional information.