Abstract The COVID-19 pandemic proved especially violent for Latinos and other minorities. Crowding, lack of health insurance and access to healthcare, and segregation produced conditions that killed Latinos and blacks from three to six times more frequently than whites. In any such emergency, trusted information is essential; in this case did social media make it worse? In this study, an initial survey found members of an extended family overrelying on unverified information from social media less likely to steady human decision making than to misinform and mislead. As people died in panic, the message service WhatsApp electrified the two-step flow of communication (Katz and Lazarsfeld), producing results as dependable as the game of telephone. In turn, social media that might produce an agenda setting effect also misinformed. For example, YouTube conveyed misinformation regarding the pandemic throughout 2020, information in turn shared in reverse by the two-step flow by Latinos across the United States. To assess the dimensions of the problem, this study retrieved and content analyzed YouTube videos in 2020 that contained information about COVID-19, and split them for analysis into five categories. References from The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and World Health Organization (WHO) were used to fact check the videos. The preliminary analysis provided evidence supporting the thrust of the study. Keywords: COVID-19, Latinos, Agenda-Setting, YouTube, Two-Step Flow

Disinformation is a problem that has been influencing and affecting multiple facets of human experience simultaneously. As technology continues to advance, digital literacy has been struggling to keep up. Despite this, there is very little conclusive data on how people interact with disinformation on social media in their daily lives. This study aims to look at how disinformation manifests itself on social media and present possible points of solution as we go forward. In this context, disinformation is defined as any false information that is intended to mislead, deceive, or confuse. The study explored digital literacy and disinformation across various generations using 30–45-minute qualitative interviews, conducted remotely with participants across five different states. Respondents were asked about their social media use and digital literacy. The interviews were then coded using inductive coding and analyzed. The results show the effect of digital apathy across multiple generation as well as a lack of digital literacy when it comes to news stories. The results suggest that digital apathy and illiteracy are fundamental elements that aid in disinformation spread. Fearful of retaliation for going against the curated crowd, respondents would rather not waste their time or energy to correct false information. The need for digital sympathy and literacy is crucial to fight back against rampant disinformation campaigns to protect the future generations of social media.

With the current racial climate and the continual growth of online presence, strong interest has gravitated to social media usage and its causes and effects. Its connection with social movements had been taking a big liking as well. A heightened awareness of social problems has been achieved through media coverage and in this realm specifically, social media by multiple platforms including but limited to Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Thus social media usage will be analyzed to study race relations within different social movement organizations (SMOs) and their social media accounts. These organizations being Free Ohio Now, Black Lives Matter Cleveland Chapter, and Showing Up for Racial Justice. The qualitative research method being used to conduct this examination is content analysis. We will be collecting data from the aforementioned SMOs from January 1, 2020 to January 31, 2021 from the accounts online. Coding will be done to organize important themes and central patterns for the ultimate findings of how social media is used within these organizations’ social movements in their surrounding communities and beyond regarding race relations.

In the last decade, the far-right movement in the United States has become highly visible in public life, and members of the movement have attributed YouTube for their personal radicalization. However, the majority of research on YouTube’s role as a radicalizing agent has studied the platform’s recommendations of extreme content; only a few scholars examine the right-wing channels involved with pushing individuals farther right. In order to combat the nuanced, individually experienced process of far-right radicalization, we must deepen our understanding of why and how right-wing content appeals to millions of users. This study offers a qualitative approach to six right-wing YouTube channels and the videos they produce, with a specific focus on how meaning and community is created and referenced in their content. We employ ethnographic video observation and grounded theory approach to notice, record, and analyze the various verbal and nonverbal features present in a channel’s videos. We hope our observations will allow us to identify patterns and shared instances of video rhetoric, framing, and style across multiple channels.