John Oliver has previously covered misinformation many times on Last Week Tonight. He covered everything from vaccine myths to coronavirus conspiracyacies. On Sunday, he returned to the topic.
This time, the focus was on misinformation spread among non-English-speaking communities. Recently, this issue was highlighted by Facebook's revelations about how little time it spends moderating content from outside the U.S.
Oliver continued to discuss examples of misinformation within diaspora communities. These included Vietnamese Americans turning to YouTube because there were not enough credible news sources in Vietnamese and memes being spread on private messaging apps such as WhatsApp and WeChat.
Oliver stated that "a key problem right now, many communities don’t have the same fact checking resources as English-speaking ones."
"Beyond this, platforms must be subject to public pressure to stop misinformation in any form, English or not. This is because a lot of things depend on it."
Oliver's team has also created a series of memes and videos that can be used to tell a relative they have misinformed them.
