This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Markup.
Sonia Ohlala is not your typical YouTube influencer.
Her videos — all in Vietnamese and targeted to the Vietnamese immigrants in America — often come with titles that contain unfounded claims or misleading statements:
On January 6, 2021, Ohlala live streamed while attending one of the protests that later led to the attack on the U.S. Capitol. The next day, she called for her viewers to “Fight for President Trump in Washington DC! Historic moment!” A year later, Ohlala posted about proudly fighting “for my country and my rights” alongside “hundreds of thousands of patriots from all over the United States” who “gathered together in Washington DC to demand transparency for a disgraceful stolen election.”
These videos from Ohlala have since been deleted from YouTube, but The Markup was able to access the original video descriptions through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
After The Markup first reported on how Ohlala regularly translated misleading far-right websites like The Gateway Pundit and Newsmax into Vietnamese, more than a dozen Vietnamese community members asked The Markup to dig further. They wanted to know why she was broadcasting in Vietnamese and why her videos were so heavily pro-Trump. Several community members also shared suspicions that she was a Russian agent — to them, her content seemed to bear the hallmarks of the ways in which Russian political actors used misinformation to sow division among Americans during the 2016 election cycle. They also worried she may be partially created through deepfake technology like generative AI or text-to-speech tools because her images use heavy filters and because she publishes so frequently.
The vast majority of Ohlala’s YouTube videos show her in front of a green screen, but she occasionally posts photos of herself, many featuring guns, on her YouTube community page. Recently, she posted a photo of herself with a Los Angeles-based “I voted” sticker. In older posts, she wrote about how hot it was in California and how high gas prices were in Southern California.
But there isn’t much information on Ohlala beyond that. Searches for her name on multiple public records databases and other social platforms did not return any results outside of her online persona as a vlogger, suggesting that Sonia Ohlala is not her real name.
Multiple attempts to reach Ohlala also led nowhere. On her Facebook page, Ohlala listed an address in Florida (rather than California), a Facebook email, and a phone number. The Markup tried to contact her using all three. Her number, which has a British Columbia area code, was disconnected. Her Florida address pulled up ten names, and after calling every phone number listed for those addresses, The Markup found they were all disconnected. The Markup also emailed and messaged Ohlala on Facebook, but all messages have gone unanswered. Finally, The Markup posted comments on her You
