President-elect Trump is promising major tariffs that could impact retailers and their consumers.

A tariff is a tax placed on goods when they cross national borders.

Trump has said all U.S. trading partners could face tariffs of up to 20%. He's said goods from China could be levied at 60% or higher on some specific products.

"I will impose whatever tariffs are required 100%, 200%, 1,000%," Trump said of some Chinese imports during an event in October.

The potential for these tariffs is already having some retailers rethink their business, and it could mean consumers paying higher prices.

"It's not a one size fits all situation with this," said Bill Reinsch, Chair in International Business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Each company, each retailer is going to decide what it wants to do for itself. Sometimes, they'll choose to eat part of the tariff. In other words, absorb some of the increased price and simply have a lower profit margin in order to maintain their market share. But most of the time, they pass part, if not all of it, onto the consumer."

Walmart's chief financial officer John David Rainey told CNBC if Trump's tariffs take effect "there probably will be cases where prices will go up for consumers."

Lowe's CEO Marvin Ellison also addressed the topic on the company's earnings call on Tuesday.

"Like everyone, we're waiting to see what happens when the Trump administration actually takes office in January," Ellison said. "Having said that, we feel good about the processes and the systems we put in place since the first Trump administration to manage tariffs or other challenges."

The Home Depot told Scripps News it's following this situation to see how it could impact its business.

"It's too early to speculate, but tariffs would impact our industry more broadly," The Home Depot said in a statement to Scripps. "The majority of our goods are sourced in the U.S. While the remaining products are not all sourced from Asia, we do source from several Asian countries, so we are watching this issue closely. Our teams have been through this before and we anticipate that we will manage through any new tariffs similarly to how we have done so in the past."

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Trump sees tariffs as having two purposes raising revenue for the government and taking money from other countries. The Tax Foundation estimates a 20% tariff on all goods would raise $3.3 trillion for the federal government from 2025 through 2034.

The Peterson Institute for International Economics projects Trump's tariff plan could cost the average U.S. household $2,600 per year.

Toy guns, a doggy xylophone, and a friendly-looking bright yellow stuffed animal are all on Santa's naughty list this year.

They're some of the nominees listed among the "10 Worst Toys" this holiday season, according to World Against Toys Causing Harm Inc., a non-profit focused on educating the public about potentially dangerous children's products.

The organization has put out the list for the past 52 years. It's president, Joan Siff, announced the list Tuesday morning.

This year's full list of dangerous toys includes the Pinovk Toy Colt 45 Pistol, Bristle Hedgehog, Transformers Earthspark Cyber-Sleeve, Kinetic Sand Scents - Ice Cream Treats, Wubble Rumblers Inflatable Furious Fist, Click N' Play Toy Remote Set, Snackles - Sandy, X-Shot Poppy Playtime, Playzone-Fit Tri-Flyer and the Zoo Jamz Doggy Xylophone.

"A toy can be dangerous because it's improperly manufactured, improperly designed, not marketed well," Siff said. "Those are all different phases of production where something can go wrong."

The organization's concern is that many toys appear harmless but can pose a danger in the hands of a young child.

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Toy injuries have increased for three years in a row. More than 184,000 injuries from toys were treated in emergency departments last year, according to a report from ValuePenguin, an insurance research site from LendingTree. But overall, toy-related injuries are down more than 20 percent over the past decade.

"You can safely buy toys for your children," said Divya Sangameshwar, an insurance expert at ValuePenguin. "Just make sure that you're buying toys that are safe and age appropriate, and if you want to buy toys, make sure that your children are being supervised when they play with them."

In a statement to Scripps News, The Toy Association, a U.S. trade group, said it "advocates for children's safety all year long, in contrast to W.A.T.C.H., which is heard from only once or twice per year, and whose false claims are not made by actual safety experts. Their report is riddled with misinformation and serves only to frighten families during what is meant to be a joyous time of year. What's important to know is that by law, all toys sold in the United States must first meet 100+ rigorous safety tests and standards before reaching consumers. ... Families are reminded to choose toys that are appropriate for their child's age, interests, and abilities; to avoid purchasing counterfeit or illegitimate product from rogue or third-party sellers by only shopping from reputable stores and online sellers; and to supervise children during play."

Spirit Airlines announced on Monday that it is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

One of the country's largest low-cost carriers, Spirit operates across 90 destinations in the U.S., Latin America, and the Caribbean. The company stated that it would continue to operate normally while restructuring its debt through the bankruptcy process.

"Guests can continue to book and fly without interruption and can use all tickets, credits, and loyalty points as normal," Spirit said in a press release on Monday.

The company also confirmed that employees would continue to be paid throughout the process.

The Associated Press reported that Spirit faced looming debt payments of more than $1 billion over the next year, following losses of $2.5 billion over the past four years.

"I am pleased we have reached an agreement with a supermajority of both our loyalty and convertible bondholders on a comprehensive recapitalization of the Company, which is a strong vote of confidence in Spirit and our long-term plan," said Ted Christie, Spirit's president and chief executive officer. "This set of transactions will materially strengthen our balance sheet and position Spirit for the future while we continue executing on our strategic initiatives to transform our Guest experience, providing new enhanced travel options, greater value and increased flexibility.

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Spirt Airlines is known for its low fares, but also for fewer service offerings.

"There's a difference between low service and no service," aviation historian and University of Dayton professor Janet Bednarek told Scripps News. "And (travelers) are increasingly seeing the budget airlines as no service rather than low service, and they're willing to pay a little bit more to get a little bit of service."

While Spirit has struggled, other airlines have successfully bounced back since COVID.

The International Air Transport Association says the industry is en route to record revenue and a record number of scheduled flights this year.

Domestic travel has come back too. This summer, the TSA notched its first-ever day of screening over three million passengers.

"There has been a bounce back from COVID much faster than I ever thought would happen," Bednarek said. And, it's got longevity. It wasn't just, you know, in 2003, it's come into 2024 and it seems like people really do want to travel."

The bankruptcy announcement from Spirit Airlines was foreshadowed last week. Spirit's stock plummeted more than 50% after The Wall Street Journal reported that the airline was preparing to file for bankruptcy.

The bankruptcy filing follows at least two failed attempts to merge with other airlines. Frontier Airlines was first in line in 2022, but JetBlue eventually won favor and was set to merge with Spirit. However, that merger fell through due to opposition from the federal government, which argued it violated antitrust laws. Spirit reportedly renewed efforts to merge with Frontier, but those negotiations were also unsuccessful.

Election interference is increasingly relying on artificial intelligence and deepfakes. That's why one viral public service ad is using them as a warning sign.

"This election bad actors are going to use AI to trick you into not voting," the ad says. "Do not fall for it. This threat is very real."

The "Don't Let AI Steal Your Vote" video features Hollywood stars like Rosario Dawson, Amy Schumer, Chris Rock and Michael Douglas. But many of them aren't real. Douglas, Rock and Schumer, for example, are deepfakes.

"The artists who are involved in this were super enthusiastic about doing it," Joshua Graham Lynn, CEO and Cofounder of RepresentUs, the national and non-partisan anti-corruption organization behind the video, told Scripps News.

"Everybody that you see there either gave us their likeness or performed in person volunteer. They all were super excited to do it to help get out the vote because they know this is a really important election," Lynn added.

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The video, which has amassed over 6 million views on YouTube, warns voters to pay closer attention to what they see and hear online.

"If something seems off it probably is," the real-life Rosario Dawson says in the video.

"Right now, it's so hard to tell what's real and fake on the Internet," Lynn said. "You just look at any new video, and you sometimes can't tell if it's just been made completely by AI."

"The technology is moving fast, and more importantly, malicious actors are always going to be at the forefront," he added.

Disinformation experts and community leaders have called out AI-generated content being used to sow chaos and confusion around the election. The Department of Homeland Security, ABC News previously reported, warned state election officials that AI tools could be used to "create fake election records; impersonate election staff to gain access to sensitive information; generate fake voter calls to overwhelm call centers; and more convincingly spread false information online."

"And so what we want is for voters to use their brains," Lynn said. "Be skeptical if you see something telling you not to participate. If you see something about a candidate that you support, question it. Double-check it."

While deepfakes could be used to spread election disinformation, experts warn they could also be used to obliterate the public's trust in official sources, facts, or their own instincts.

"We have situations where we're all starting to doubt the information that we're coming across, especially information related to politics," Purdue University Professor and Kaylyn Jackson Schiff told Scripps News. "And then with the election environment that we're in, we've seen examples of claims that real images are deepfakes."

Schiff said this phenomenon, this widespread uncertainty, is part of a concept called "the liar's dividend."

"Being able to credibly claim that real images or videos are fake due to widespread awareness of deepfakes and manipulated media," she said.

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Schiff, who is also the co-director of Purdue's Governance and Responsible AI Lab, and Purdue University PhD candidate Christina Walker have tracked political deepfakes since June 2023, capturing over 500 instances in their Political Deepfakes Incidents Database.

"A lot of the things that we capture in the database, the communication goal is actually for satire, so almost more similar to a political cartoon," Walker told Scripps News. "It's not always because everything is very malicious and intended to cause harm."

Still, Walker and Schiff say some of the deepfakes mean "reputational harm," and even parody videos meant for entertainment can take on a new meaning if shared out of context.

"It's still a concern that some of these deepfakes that are initially propagated for fun could deceive individuals who don't know the original context if that post is then shared again later," Schiff said.

While the deepfakes in the "Don't Let AI Steal Your Vote" video are hard to spot, Scripps News took a closer look and found visual artifacts and shadows disappearing. The technology of deepfakes has improved, but Walker said for now there are still tell-tale signs.

"This can be extra fingers or missing fingers, blurry faces, writing in the image, not being quite right or not lining up. Those things can all indicate that something is a deepfake," Walker said. "As these models get better, it does become harder to tell. But there are still ways to fact-check it."

Fact-checking a deepfake or any video that triggers an emotional response, especially around the election, should start with official sources like secretaries of state or vote.gov.

"We encourage people to search for additional sources of information, especially if it's about politics and close to an election," Schiff said. "As well as just generally thinking about who the source of the information is and what motivations they might have in sharing that information."

"If there's anything telling you as a voter, 'Don't go to the polls. Things have been changed. There's a disturbance. Things have been delayed. You can come back tomorrow,' double-check your sources. That's the most important thing right now."

As Hurricane Milton slams Florida, scientists have joined officials battling the latest conspiracy theory in the deluge of disinformation: weather manipulation.

The conspiracy theory claims that recent hurricanes have been geo-engineered for special interests by the government. Like most conspiracy theories, this weather manipulation conspiracy is gleaned from a nugget of nuanced reality.

"The most durable conspiracy theories really do stem from a very small piece of truth that's usually at the center of a bunch of other lies and myths and hoaxes and things like that," according to Mike Rothschild, conspiracy theory expert and author of "Jewish Space Lasers: The Rothschilds and 200 Years of Conspiracy Theories."

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The latest disinformation swirling the hurricanes have pointed to Project STORMFURY, an effort whereby U.S. government attempted "human interference and hurricane modification" during the Cold War.

"Back in the 1950s and 60s, there were experiments to try to weaken weather systems, but the results were really inconclusive," Dr. Kristen Corbosiero, a meteorologist and professor University at Albany, told Scripps News. "And so, the experiments were not continued."

Rothschild said that while those experiments were real, "That does not mean that Hurricane Milton was caused by government-controlled lasers and is being steered toward Tampa."

"One thing being true does not mean that another thing is true," he added.

The weather control conspiracy theory evolved from wild accusations that began with Hurricane Helene. Shortly after Helene devastated regions in the Southeast, former President Donald Trump on Truth Social baselessly accused FEMA of "going out of their way to not help people in republican areas."

Trump repeated the baseless claim, saying people are "being treated very badly in the Republican areas."

Many posts on X further amplified the claim, saying that FEMA also wasn't providing relief to certain communities because they are not immigrants.

Building off the false claim, a conspiracy theory that the weather is being controlled and hurricanes are being steered toward Republican strongholds.

In a viral post on X, U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who represents a district in North Georgia that was also hit by Hurricane Helene, appeared to imply the government, Democrats, or scientists created the storm.

"Yes they can control the weather," she wrote. "It's ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can't be done."

The conspiracy theory post had reached over 40 million views a week after Helene hit.

The congresswoman doubled down in another viral tweet, saying, "Ask your government if the weather is manipulated or controlled."

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Scientists denounced the conspiracy theories.

"Meteorologists do not control the weather," Corbosiero told Scripps News. "I think there's hope that we could develop something to maybe mitigate storms and mitigate disasters. But as of current, we do not have anything like."

"I can't believe I have to post this. NO, we are not 'making' these hurricanes. There is absolutely no possible way that cloud seeding, lasers, or anything else you've seen on the internet can impact these storms," Georgia meteorologist Ella Dorsey posted on Facebook. "We barely understand them enough to predict them, let alone CREATE them. To suggest so is complete misunderstanding of basic science."

Some posts online have accused President Joe Biden and Trump's presidential opponent Vice President Kamala Harris of sending Hurricane Milton to attack Trump supporters in Florida.

This weather weapon conspiracy theory picked up steam after Hurricane Helene hit key battleground state North Carolina.

"When you have a massive Category 5 hurricane like Milton or the destruction that was caused by Hurricane Helene, it's natural for people to think something else is going on here, particularly with the timing of the election," Rothschild said.

"We saw the same thing happening in 2012 when we had superstorm Sandy affecting New York. People immediately thought it was Obama trying to come up with some excuse to cancel the election," he added.

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Within a day of Hurricane Sandy pummeling parts of the Northeast over a decade ago, Trump tweeted "Hurricane is good luck for Obama again- he will buy the election by handing out billions of dollars."

"I don't think it's a coincidence that some of the earliest lean conspiracy theories were coming, particularly from North Carolina, which is a state Trump needs to win," Rothschild said.

Both Republicans and Democrats have spoken out against conspiracy theories, calling them "outrageous," "irresponsible," "beyond ridiculous" and "just plain false." Politicizing Hurricane Milton, many have said, distracts from crucial information being shared by officials.

"There is a lot of misinformation out there coming from all kinds of directions about hurricanes. And I think really what needs to be what really should be the focus is protecting life and property," Corbosiero said. "There are people who have suffered from Helene and are going to really suffer for Milton. And so, I really wish as a meteorologist, that would be the focus."

As a wild and baseless rumor about an immigrant community in Springfield, Ohio, made its way from a Facebook post and onto a national stage, reporters, internet sleuths, and everyday social media users were able to track where the consequential false claim had originated.

But what if that insidious allegation was made in a group chat on a private messaging app like WhatsApp instead?

"It's kind of the wild, wild west," Jenny Liu, a misinformation and disinformation policy manager at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, told Scripps News. "It's just harder to monitor stuff that's happening in these closed channels."

WhatsApp, one of the most popular private messaging platforms in the U.S., is best known for its encryption. Similar to apps like Telegram, Signal and Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp ensures users' messages in group chats or dedicated channels are private, making them immune to fact-checking.

"With those messaging apps, you kind of had this really double-edged sword," Dr. Inga Trauthig, head of research at the Propaganda Research Lab at the Center for Media Engagement at The University of Texas at Austin, told Scripps News.

"On the one hand, it's seen as like a private space." But on the other hand, Trauthig said, because these apps are encrypted and messages are private, it's nearly impossible to moderate or fact-check content the way Facebook or X does for public posts.

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More than 85 million people in America use WhatsApp which is owned by Facebook's parent company Meta, but Asian and Latino Americans make up the majority of WhatsApp users in the U.S. Over half, 54%, of Hispanic adults and 51% of Asian adults say they use the platform, according to Pew Research Center. Whereas 31% of Black adults and 20% of white adults use WhatsApp.

Experts and community leaders say Asian and Latino Americans, the fastest growing groups of eligible 2024 voters, according to Pew Research, are targeted by disinformation on WhatsApp.

"What we've seen is disinformation being used intentionally, not as something that may be. 'Hey I got something wrong and then a fact check it.' No, this has been done intentionally," Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, told Scripps News.

Disinformation targeting Latino Americans has ramped up ahead of November, Garcia said.

"In states like Florida, Texas, Colorado, Arizona, the Latino vote is the vote that could decide who becomes the next president. And if you can get three or five percent of people to change their vote or to just stay at home, that could be the difference in terms of the political power and what happens in Washington, D.C.," he added.

Garcia said false information on WhatsApp uses specific terms like 'socialism' and 'communist' to strike a chord with Latino Americans, especially those with connections to countries like Cuba or Chile.

Propagandists "calling Biden, a Marxist, a communist, and [saying] Democrats are Marxists and communists," Garcia said, "are using WhatsApp as a way to reach Latino voters because Latinos disproportionately use WhatsApp to communicate with their loved ones."

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"As our numbers grow, as now we're the largest minority in the United States 65 million plus more of us are voting now we're being targeted by these elements using WhatsApp and other areas for their propaganda, misinformation and disinformation," Evelyn Prez-Verda, founder of the strategic communications agency We Are Ms, told Scripps News. Her agency works to meet the "dire need of quality information" in South Florida communities, which are largely Latino.

"Mis and disinformation have always existed in different formats. Now, what happens is that we have a digital borderless format," Prez-Verda said.

While borderless, WhatsApp is still difficult for fact checkers to penetrate. Community organizations have therefore turned to everyday users to help contain or cut off the flood of false information.

What's True Crew

Dr. Amod Sureka is a father and physician and in the little spare time he has in a day, he catches misinformation about elections as they enter group chats.

"I think it's going to be people like me who might be a bridge from the people who know even less than I do about politics to the very, gung ho professional politicians," Sureka told Scripps News.

Sureka, who is Indian American, is a member of the "WhatsApp True Crew," a group created by Indian American Impact fighting against election misinformation in South Asian American communities.

"Certainly there are those differences of opinion, but there are also frank disinformation being put out in terms of politician's records," Sureka said.

For example, one WhatsApp message captured by the What's True Crew, and reviewed by Scripps News, appears to attack Vice President Kamala Harris' racial identity. The message includes a link to a 2018 YouTube video, urging Indian American voters to watch it before they cast their ballots in November.

"I will tell you for most of, her Kamala Harris' career, she refers to herself as African American. She rarely talks about her Indian heritage" the video says.

The message featuring the video was sent after former President and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump falsely questioned Harris's race in July.

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"She was always of Indian heritage, and she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn't know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black," Trump said during an on-stage interview.

Sarah Shah with Indian American Impact, the organization behind the What's True Cew, says misinformation like this has "eroded trust in our democracy. It's pitted communities against one another."

What complicates the matter, Shah says, "You are in groups largely with your family and friends and like-minded individuals. And so most people within a group in some way is a trusted messenger."

"The WhatsApp groups that I'm part of, they're kind of built around a given community. For that reason, I think we have this natural trust in people who are like us," he says.

This trust can be exploited by bad actors hoping to influence people in his community who aren't familiar with US politics, Sureka says.

"There's a lot of stuff coming to us, and it makes it really challenging for me to discern what's true or not. And certainly, for people who are less familiar with what's going on," he adds.

Anu Kosaraju, also a member of the "What's True Crew," says he is amazed by the kind of false information he sees in his WhatsApp groups.

"You think of this misinformation or disinformation as little bullets hitting the community," Kosaraju tells Scripps News.

What's scary about the encrypted platform, she adds, is "when it comes from a friend or an acquaintance or a relative, there is an immediate sense of authenticity to it.

"That's when I realized how much WhatsApp had taken hold as an actual source of information as if it was like BBC or some other kind of an official or trustworthy source," she said.

'Slippery fingers'

Half of American adults get their news from some form of social media, according to the Pew Research Center. Meanwhile, major social media platforms are being called out by fact-checking groups for their insufficient response to misinformation, particularly ahead of the 2024 election. These critiques come as content moderation tools, teams and metrics continue to disappear and disinformation campaigns grow in sophistication by the day.

"Users who we spoke to, for instance, from diaspora communities in the U.S. would say, 'Well, WhatsApp is really important for me. It's a private space. I talk about things that maybe I'm not comfortable talking about on Facebook. And I also talk about the news and about politics with my community. So, I don't want anyone from the outside in here,'" propaganda researcher Dr. Inga Kristina Trauthig said.

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False information easily spreads in these groups by what Kosaraju calls "slippery fingers."

"It's one of those things that is so scarily easy with just a finger push, two clicks and then there you are, spreading the same disinformation or spreading something that may or may not be 100% true," she said.

A popular feature on WhatsApp is the ability to forward a message from one chat to another.

"On WhatsApp, you just click a forward button and you can send it," Shah said. "You can broadcast it. You can send it to groups that might have only a few people, but they might also have 250 people. And then others can forward it and there's no real way to track that picture or video, to see its original source."

Encrypted messaging apps are either late or completely missing from the content moderation game. If false content is debunked, removed or labeled as misinformation on another social media platform, it still lives on in WhatsApp messages, Inga said.

"Often tweets would also just be put into a WhatsApp chat and then even if the tweet might not exist anymore, was discredited sometime afterwards. The WhatsApp conversation about it still continues," she says.

"I think that's where the companies can help us by nipping it in the bud," Kosaraju says. "Don't even let that fake news through."

A spokesperson for Meta, WhatsApp's parent company, told Scripps News it has incorporated new tools to help stop the spread of suspicious or false information, including labels and limits on forwarded messages, banning mass messaging, and providing more support for a large network of fact-checkers.

With no federal regulation of misinformation on social media platforms, the onus to put guardrails in place, especially in an election year, falls solely on companies and their policies. But as in the case of Meta, those policies and how they're enforced can vary depending on which platform Facebook, Instagram, Threads or WhatsApp users are on.

WhatsApp says it may take action against accounts that violate messaging guidelines like sharing illegal content, abusing reporting tools to harm other users or engaging in fraud through "purposeful deception or impersonation."

Still, the platform largely relies on users like Kosaraju and Sureka to report false information so the company can act.

"It would be far easier to just let it go and jump over to another group scroll past that message," Sureka says about misinformation he sees on WhatsApp. "But the first thought is we have to we have to rebut it for anyone who's paying attention to it. Just so incorrect information is not being left unchallenged."

Mai Bui is not your average YouTuber.

The 67-year-old retired engineer rocks her granddaughter to sleep as she edits videos for a Vietnamese show called Ngi Vit. For the past seven years, she's translated political news articles from English to Vietnamese in what she considers her fight against false information.

"I feel that I have responsibility for my senior Vietnamese community," Bui says. She worries her community is vulnerable to getting "duped by fake news, by misinformation news, by fraud."

Bui said after the 2016 election, she noticed right wing propaganda being parroted by people in her community. Depressed by what she was reading online, she tuned out the news. But when her friends started to spread false information about former President Donald Trump, she said she started translating news for them, sharing stories in direct messages on Facebook before expanding to a larger Vietnamese community on YouTube.

"They want the real news," Bui says. "They want the good information."

As new research shows exactly how communities of color are being targeted by "bad information," experts say community members like Bui make up a frontline defense against disinformation targeting Asian and Latino Americans on today's information battlefield specifically ahead of the 2024 election.

'Purposeful manipulation'

"Is the 2024 election going to happen?"

"There's going to be this new pandemic, or a new disease is going to be created in order to push mail-In ballots."

"Democrats are failing to secure the U.S. southern border in order to allow undocumented immigrants to vote for them in U.S. elections."

These are just a few of the false narratives Asian and Latino voters grapple with in a crucial election year. As communities of color make up a significant voting bloc heading into November, Asian and Latinos Americans specifically, make up the fastest growing groups of eligible 2024 voters, according to Pew Research. They also face a similar issue: language barriers that often block them from trustworthy information.

"One in three Asian Americans is limited English proficient, which means that they aren't able to use certain English language resources," Jenny Liu, a misinformation and disinformation policy manager at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, tells Scripps News.

"So when it comes to something like voting," Liu adds, "if they aren't able to go to verified or reputable news sources and get that information, they will then unfortunately turn to alternative sources and media."

False election-related narratives in Asian American communities typically start off in English before going through a "misinformation factory," Liu says.

"Usually a few days later, it then gets translated into Vietnamese, for example. And then it makes its way onto YouTube, or someone will talk about it in a video, and then it'll make its way onto a Facebook post," she says.

False information also starts off as a familiar narrative, a story or rumor someone has heard before, Roberta Braga, founder and executive director of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas, tells Scripps News.

"One of them, for example, was that elites are conspiring with media and social media to hide the truth from us," Braga says. "That's something called the global control narrative that we've seen spreading more and more. It usually has to do with the United Nations or the World Economic Forum. It's sort of affiliated with QAnon."

"The narratives opened up a window for people to accept other disinformation that they might see," Braga continues. "That opened a window for people to believe, for example, that people are using vaccines to keep us down or putting microchips in the vaccines."

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Both Braga and Liu say an intersection of topics like health, immigration and voting are being pushed ahead of the 2024 election.

Liu says there is "purposeful manipulation" behind false claims like a "new pandemic or a new disease is going to be created in order to push mail-in ballots."

This false claim creates an entryway to future disinformation about ballot fraud, Liu says. "So public health meets elections meets in the middle of this idea of fraud."

Another false narrative, that undocumented immigrants are being let into the country so they can vote in the next election.

"Immigration is a big topic that we see ahead of any election," Liu says, but now "that's being weaponized to also intersect with this idea of voting."

Similar narrative was uncovered in Latino communities by recent survey results from DDIA in partnership with YouGov. The false claims included Democrats encourage non-citizen voting and vaccines are a form of population control supported by elites and large corporations.

"What we found is that the majority of Latinos are not sure if the things they're seeing are true or false. So there's a lot of skepticism and uncertainty," Braga says. "There's also a lot of familiarity. So people recognize these false statements and narratives, but there's still not sure one way or the other if these things are true or false."

According to DDIA survey results, Latinos who are Spanish-dominant, show more uncertainty and are less inclined to dismiss the false claims they come across. Additionally, Braga says, Latinos who "tend to both come across and believe the false information the most are actually the people who are very interested in politics."

"Unfortunately, these platforms are not very good at fact checking misinformation in English, but they're much worse when it comes to content that's not in English."

Even when false information goes through a cycle of fact checking in English, chances are the translated version whether that's Vietnamese or Spanish won't go through the same process.

A spokesperson for Meta, Facebook and Instagram's parent company, told Scripps News the company has built the largest global fact-checking network of any platform and its arsenal of fact checkers span nearly 100 third-party groups reviewing viral misinformation in over 60 languages.

YouTube boasts the "careful systems" the platform has set up to help determine what is "potentially harmful misinformation." The platform plays offense against misinformation by elevating "quality information from authoritative sources."

Still, Facebook, YouTube and other major social media platforms are being called out by fact checking groups for their insufficient response to misinformation. These critiques come as content moderation tools, teams and metrics continue to disappear and misinformation campaigns grow in sophistication by the day.

Both Liu and Braga stress that Asian and Latino communities aren't more susceptible to false information they are targeted.

"And so it's not the case that we are as whole, more vulnerable or gullible than other groups," Braga says. "

"Ultimately there are really systemic factors that feed into why our community members are believing certain conspiracy theories and being siloed in these information vacuums."

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'Information Navigators'

"We have these voids of information being filled with inaccurate information from actors who understand that we are looking for accurate information to be given to us," Evelyn Prez-Verda, founder of the strategic communications agency We Are Ms, tells Scripps News.

"How do we fill these voids that currently are filled with myths and disinformation by malicious actors that want to persuade these individuals either to suppress their vote, to confuse their vote, to ensure that maybe they stay at home?" she poses.

"Information navigators."

Information navigators, or trusted messengers, sprang from a pilot project led by researchers at the Information Futures Lab at Brown University's School of Public Health. The project revealed the "dire need of quality information" in South Florida communities.

"We trust them more than any influencer," Prez-Verda, a fellow at the Information Futures Lab who helped lead the pilot, says.

These messengers, like Bui, are crucial as more Americans come across political content while using social media.

"If I am at least helping one person to understand what is the real things happening in America politics now, it fulfills my wish that I've done my job," Bui says.

While Bui would like to soon retire her microphone, she plans to keep translating news at least until November where a projected 15 million Asian Americans and over 36 million Latinos are projected to be eligible to vote.

"Because everything depends on it," she says. "Our democracy, our freedom, our money too. Everything depends on this election."