can multicultural individuals bridge the global news flow?

I consider myself multicultural...born and raised in the U.S. to immigrant parents from Nicaragua and Costa Rica. During my Facebook days, I would share or repost news from the U.S. that my families from Nicaragua and Costa Rica would share, adding my opinion/thoughts that they would eventually read, translated, of course (thanks, Facebook!). The same would happen vice versa. My families from each respective country would post news I would then repost and share with my U.S. contacts. 

We see discussions of barriers existing on the web. In my previous post, I discuss how although Web 2.0 has broken down language and geographical barriers, users still consume content regional to them. However, content and news make it at the global level. How so? Is it thanks to our multicultural individuals that help communicate the information for us? 

Below is another interesting read discussing global news-making practices on Twitter from multicultural individuals. Here is a small excerpt:

"Those who wrote in both English and Chinese were not particularly influential in this topic-focused dataset. Rather than writing in both languages, some users who were bicultural and bilingual took the role of the global translator-journalist, writing in the global language (English) about events occurring in the local language (Chinese). Others with the same skill set played the role of local translator-journalist writing in Chinese but bringing a Western cultural perspective to the story, replicating the roles defined by wire service organizations as global and local translator-journalists (Bielsa & Bassnett, 2009)."

It's interesting to note the last sentence, "writing in Chinese but bringing a Western cultural perspective to the story." What does this mean regarding the question, "Are we truly international?" 

Mao, & Menchen-Trevino, E. (2019). Global news-making practices on Twitter: Exploring English-Chinese language boundary spanning. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 12(3), 248–266. https://doi.org/10.1080/17513057.2018.1542018

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