WASHINGTON (AP) – Tom Perez was a guest on a Spanish-language talk show in Las Vegas last year when a caller received unfounded complaints about both parties and urged Latino listeners not to vote at all.
Perez, the then Democratic Party chairman, acknowledged many of the claims as focal points for # WalkAway, a group promoted by a conservative activist, Brandon Straka, who was later arrested for participating in the deadly January 6 uprising at the Capitol .
In the run-up to the November election, that call was part of a wider movement to squeeze voter turnout and spread misinformation about Democrat Joe Biden among Latinos. It was promoted on social media and often fueled by automated accounts.
The effort showed how social media and other technology can be used to spread misinformation so quickly that those who try to stop it can’t keep up. There were signs it was working in the presidential race when Donald Trump pulled large numbers of Latino votes in some areas that had been Democratic strongholds.
Videos and photos were edited. Quotes were taken out of context. Conspiracy theories were fueled, including that postal voting was rigged, the Black Lives Matter movement had ties to witchcraft, and Biden was obliged to become a socialist clique.
That stream of misinformation has only intensified since election day, researchers and political analysts say, fueling Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen and false stories surrounding the crowd that engulfed the Capitol.
More recently, it has turned into attempts to undermine coronavirus vaccination efforts.
“The volume and sources of information in the Spanish language are extremely wide and that should scare everyone,” Perez said.
The funding and organizational structure of this effort is unclear, although the reports show allegiance to Trump and opposition to Democrats.
A report released last week said that most of the false stories in the Spanish-speaking community were “ translated from English and distributed through prominent platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, as well as in closed group chat platforms such as WhatsApp, efforts that often seemed coordinated. on different platforms. “
“The most prominent and shared stories were either closely associated with or completely reused by right-wing media outlets,” said the report by researchers at Stanford University, the University of Washington, social network analysis company Graphika and Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, that studies disinformation online around the world.
Straka said via email that nothing about the #WalkAway campaign is “encouraging people not to vote.” He declined further comment.
While much of the material comes from domestic sources, it is increasingly coming from online sites in Latin America.
Misinformation originally promoted in English is translated in places like Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and Nicaragua, then reaches Spanish voters in the US through messages from their relatives in those countries. That is often shared through private WhatsApp and Facebook chats and text chains, and is usually small and targeted enough to be difficult to avoid.
“There is growing concern that this is very much part of the immigrant and first-generation information environment for many Latinos in the United States,” said Dan Restrepo, former senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council.
Those who set up such campaigns in Latin America often cannot vote in the US, but they can influence the family in this country that does.
Kevin McAlister, a spokesperson for Facebook, owner of WhatsApp, said the company announced a policy last month to remove accounts most responsible for spreading misinformation about the coronavirus vaccine and other vaccines, and has now removed millions of pieces of content. .
WhatsApp now limits users’ ability to send highly forwarded messages to more than one chat at a time. This has resulted in a 70% reduction in the number of such messages.
Now that the elections are over, advocates of disinformation campaigns are now trying to spread the chaos more widely, in particular by casting doubt on vaccines. Maria Teresa Kumar, President and CEO of Voto Latino, which is engaged in promoting Spanish voices and political engagement across the country, has personal experience.
Her mother runs an elderly care facility in Northern California and had planned for weeks to forgo a COVID-19 vaccination because a friend at a gym showed her a video that was circulating on social media. In it, a woman wearing a lab coat claiming to be a pharmacist in El Salvador says in Spanish that such vaccines are not safe.
Another story shared from Latin America to the US was an edited video of late Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis allegedly reporting Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s top infectious disease expert, dismisses it as a “fake who knows nothing about virology.”
The vaccine’s disinformation could lead to more election-related falsehoods as the 2022 midterm elections become more apparent.
Trump received about 35% support from Latino voters, according to VoteCast, an Associated Press survey of the national electorate. That helped him win in Florida, even when he lost Arizona.
Kumar said that during the presidential race, misinformation in Spanish with Hispanic roots would usually hit Florida first and “what lingers, skips” and goes to Texas, before reaching Arizona and New Mexico.
Now researchers will look to see if misinformation spreads between congressional districts. That could eventually discourage the rise of Latino in the meantime.
Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, a Florida Democratic strategist who tracks disinformation in Spanish, said those who have been spreading it since the election are watching the Biden government daily and building false stories about current events.
Brazilian Americans, for example, got manipulated video of a Democratic presidential primary debate when Biden suggested he raise $ 20 billion to help Brazil fight Amazon deforestation, making it sound like Biden was ready to send U.S. troops to that country .
Misinformation continued at such a breakneck pace after the election that more than 20 progressive Latino groups issued a letter in January urging Spanish-language radio stations and other Florida outlets to crackdown on the practice.
Pérez-Verdía, one of the signatories, said afterwards that “it has not lost weight. I now realize that it has actually doubled. “