Misinformation Campaign Targets Latinos On Issues From Voting To Covid Via Social Media
Last edited Sun Mar 7, 2021, 04:54 PM - Edit history (1)
- 'From vote to virus, misinformation campaign targets Latinos,' AP News, March 7, 2021.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Tom Perez was a guest on a Spanish-language talk radio show in Las Vegas last year when a caller launched into baseless complaints about both parties, urging Latino listeners to not cast votes at all. Perez, then chairman of the Democratic Party, recognized many of the claims as talking points for #WalkAway, a group promoted by a conservative activist, Brandon Straka, who was later arrested for participating in the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. In the run-up to the November election, that call was part of a broader, largely undetected movement to depress turnout and spread disinformation about Democrat Joe Biden among Latinos, promoted on social media and often fueled by automated accounts.
The effort showed how social media and other technology can be leveraged to spread misinformation so quickly that those trying to stop it cannot keep up. There were signs that it worked as Donald Trump swung large numbers of Latino votes in the 2020 presidential race in some areas that had been Democratic strongholds. Videos and pictures were doctored. Quotes were taken out of context. Conspiracy theories were fanned, including that voting by mail was rigged, that the Black Lives Matter movement had ties to witchcraft and that Biden was beholden to a cabal of socialists. That flow of misinformation has only intensified since Election Day, researchers and political analysts say, stoking Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen and false narratives around the mob that overran the Capitol.
More recently, it has morphed into efforts to undermine vaccination efforts against the coronavirus.
“The volume and sources of Spanish language information are exceedingly wide-ranging and that should scare everyone,” Perez said. The funding and the organizational structure of this effort is not clear, although the messages show a fealty to Trump and opposition to Democrats. A nonpartisan academic report released this past week said most false narratives in the Spanish-language community “were translated from English and circulated via prominent platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, as well as in closed group chat platforms like WhatsApp, and efforts often appeared coordinated across platforms.” “The most prominent narratives and those shared were either closely aligned with or completely repurposed from right-wing media outlets,” said the report.. While much of the material is coming from domestic sources such as Spanish-speaking social media “influencers,” it increasingly originating on online sites in Latin America, those studying it closely say.
Misinformation originally promoted in English is translated in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua and elsewhere, then reaches Hispanic voters in the U.S. via communications from their relatives in those countries. That is often shared via private WhatsApp and Facebook chats and text chains. “There’s this growing concern that this is very much part of the immigrant and first-generation information environment for a lot of Latinos in the United States,” said Dan Restrepo, former senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council. “A lot of it is seemingly coming through family and other group chats, whose origins are in-region rather than the United States.”...
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https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-donald-trump-race-and-ethnicity-media-misinformation-9696392bf389ba8ca3441d2314abcefa
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- Misinformation and Mistrust Among Obstacles Latinos Face In Getting Vaccinated, NPR, 3/7/21,
https://www.npr.org/2021/03/07/974383411/misinformation-and-mistrust-among-the-obstacles-latinos-face-in-getting-vaccinat
- Tom Perez, DNC Chair in Los Angeles, Dec. 19, 2019.
