What can we learn from the private messaging networks of immigrant communities?

On a fall day last year, a Ghanaian immigrant to the United States tragically lost her life on the tracks at a New York subway station. After dropping her phone, she frantically climbed down on the elevated tracks of the Simpson Street station in the Bronx to retrieve it. I’ve seen a video of her carefully crawling, trying to retrieve the phone minutes before she was struck by a train entering the station.

This story was not immediately covered by any local television, print or digital publication. I didn’t know or speak to any of her family members or witnesses of the event. The only reason I’m aware this occurred was because my mother sent it to me. The context of the event and video was shared with her in one of her WhatsApp groups.

Private digital social networks

My mother is in her late 60s and has been in the U.S. for close to 50 years. She is not on Twitter or Facebook. She doesn’t use Google much and hardly deals with email. However, she knows much more about the Ghanian immigrant communities in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., than I do — someone who used to run a media-tech company focused on the Pan-African community with digitally distributed news. Funerals, christenings, church gossip, job openings, and off-the-market apartment rentals in these cities and known to her.

Much of what she knows is communicated to her through mobile messaging. Digital flyers, videos, memes, photos, and text stories are either directly sent by people in her network or shared with her as a member of various WhatsApp groups. She is clearly getting her news from digital social networks; they just aren’t open and public spaces.

There are likely millions of people with an immigrant background, from a variety of home countries, that fit the user profile of my mother. They all rely on private digital social networks as their main source of community-focused news and information.

What I’m doing at Stanford

I’m here at Stanford University as a John S. Knight Journalism Fellow this academic year researching the formation and culture of the private digital messaging spaces made for immigrant communities in the U.S. I’m curious about what else is being shared in these groups. How do these groups form? Who runs these groups and how do new members find them? What kinds of information are shared in these spaces? How can practitioners in journalism, tech, academia, and public policy better reach these communities in these spaces?

If we are able to learn more about the flow and types of information shared in these spaces, we may all be able to provide value and better reach these communities. There is an opportunity to apply messaging technology in new ways in immigrant communities that could improve access to information and our knowledge of community needs and challenges.

How I arrived at this idea

From 2014 to 2018 I was the COO and chief editor of ZNews Africa, which I co-founded. We made mobile app, web and email products that made it easier for people to find stories about the Pan-African community that went beyond war, poverty, and disease.

Our flagship product was a mobile app that was basically a Flipboard for Pan-African news. Anytime I met someone of African descent, especially an immigrant, I would ask them to download our app. After doing this for several years I realized there are a good number of African immigrants who have smartphones but are not comfortable enough with the technology of their devices.

It wasn’t uncommon for me to pitch our app to someone and realize they are unable to download it because they do not have an email address. The Google Play Store requires that you have one to access the store and download apps. This would happen most often whenever I entered a cab in New York and asked my African driver if he would download the ZNews app.

These experiences led me to experiment with approaching digital news distribution differently. Instead of trying to encourage new behavior to fit my news product, I wanted to build something that complemented the current behavior of people.

In 2017 with the help of John Keefe, head of the Quartz AI Studio, I built a JavaScript prototype for an SMS news service targeted at cab drivers interested in African news. They subscribed to the service by texting a word to a phone number. I was able to distribute a short news blurb or image to all subscribers daily.

The most valuable feature was that subscribers could send replies or inquiries to me just like they were sending a message to anyone else and I could respond using Google Voice as the interface.

The potential impact of this work

What if an entire immigrant community had a messaging service that delivered trusted and relevant news clips to their phones? This would also enable users to send commentary and inquiries that would help improve the service. Further, the messaging space would allow users to send inquiries to be connected to resources and people in their own communities for legal aid, language help, health information, and documentation.

Imagine this robust batch of information accessible to everyone with a simple digital message. A text, photograph, meme, chart, or gif could tell a variety of stories in a digestible way that could be shared.

This could start small at first, with real humans responding and eventually an AI system could learn common questions and generate accurate responses. The conversations and news could also be studied to tip journalists to stories that need to be reported or investigated. Reports of biased incidents could be collected and tracked.

Developing a tech-enabled two-sided messaging service would ensure relevant stories could be discovered and critical information could always be widely disseminated. It’s an opportunity to include a demographic that largely works within the analog bubble of their ethnic houses of worship and commerce.

Here’s a chance to use less flashy but reliable tech to deliver value.

Next steps: Collaborators and commentary welcome

Over the next few months, I will have conversations with people in tech familiar with digital communities. I have had some introductory conversations with community folks at Reddit and Slack to help me understand the tech side of these spaces.

I would love to connect with others with experience working with, forming, or studying closed digital communities. I am also joining a few WhatsApp groups to get a better sense of the culture first hand.

If you are a professional in media, journalism, tech, design, policy, or any other space interested in immigrant communities, underserved groups, digital culture, and building things for overlooked and ignored people, I encourage you to send me a note at rainmj@stanford.edu.

Have a statement or a question? Please share in the comments section below.

Michael Rain leverages storytelling and technology to expand the world’s perception of diverse communities. He is the founder of ENODI, a Stanford Knight Fellow, and a TED Resident & Speaker with a TED Talk that has over 1 million views.