WASHINGTON (AP) – Tom Perez was invited to a Spanish-language radio show in Las Vegas last year when a caller made unfounded complaints about both sides, urging Latino listeners not to vote at all.
Perez, then chairman of the Democratic Party, acknowledged many of the demands as points of discussion for #WalkAway, a group promoted by conservative activist Brandon Straka, who was later arrested for participating in the January 6 deadly uprising in the US Chapter.
In the run-up to the November election, the call was part of a wider movement to reduce turnout and spread misinformation about Democrat Joe Biden among Latinos. It has been promoted on social media and often powered by automated accounts.
The effort has shown how social media and other technologies can be used to spread misinformation so quickly that those trying to stop it can’t keep up. There were signs that he would run in the presidential race, while Donald Trump attracted a large number of Latin American votes in some areas that had been democratic strongholds.
Videos and images were processed. The quotes were taken out of context. Conspiracy theories were aired, including the fact that the postal vote was rigged, the Black Lives Matter movement had links to witchcraft, and Biden was viewed by a cabal of socialists.
The flow of misinformation has intensified only since election day, say researchers and political analysts, backing Trump’s unfounded claims that the election was stolen and false narratives around the crowd that passed the Chapter.
More recently, it has turned into efforts to undermine coronavirus vaccination efforts.
“The volume and sources of information in Spanish are extremely wide and should scare everyone,” Perez said.
The funding and organizational structure of this effort are unclear, although the messages show loyalty to Trump and opposition to Democrats.
A report released last week said most of the false narratives in the Spanish-speaking community “have been translated from English and broadcast via prominent platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, as well as closed group chat platforms such as WhatsApp, efforts that coordinates often appear across platforms. ”
“The most prominent and shared narratives were either closely aligned or completely redistributed from right-wing media,” said the report by researchers at Stanford University, University of Washington, social media analytics firm Graphika and Atlantic Council DFRLab. , which studies online misinformation around the world.
Straka said in an email that nothing in the #WalkAway Campaign “encourages people not to vote.” He declined to comment.
While much of the material comes from domestic sources, it is increasingly coming from Latin American online sites.
The misinformation originally promoted in English is translated in places like Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and Nicaragua, then reaches Hispanic voters in the US through communications from their relatives in those countries. This is often shared through private chats and through Facebook chats and text chains and is usually small and targeted enough to be difficult to prevent.
“There is a growing concern that this is part of the immigrant and first-generation information environment for many Latin Americans in the United States,” said Dan Restrepo, a senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council. .
Those who initiated such campaigns in Latin America often cannot vote in the United States, but they can influence the family in this country that does.
Kevin McAlister, a spokesman for Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, said last month the company announced a policy to eliminate the accounts most responsible for spreading misinformation about the coronavirus vaccine and other vaccines and that it has now removed millions of pieces of content. .
WhatsApp now limits users’ ability to send highly forwarded messages to multiple chats at once. This has led to a 70% reduction in the number of such messages.
With the elections behind them, supporters of disinformation campaigns are now trying to spread more chaos, especially by trying to cast doubt on vaccines. Maria Teresa Kumar, president and CEO of Voto Latino, who works to promote Hispanic voting and political engagement at the national level, has personal experience.
Her mother runs a nursing home in northern California and spent weeks planning to give up vaccination against COVID-19 because a friend at a gym had shown her a video circulating on social media. In it, a woman wearing a lab coat and claiming to be a pharmacist in El Salvador says in Spanish that such vaccines are not safe.
Another shared narrative from Latin America to the US featured a documented video of the late Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis allegedly dismissing Dr. Anthony Fauci, the world’s leading infectious disease expert, as a “fake who he doesn’t know anything about virology. ”
Vaccine misinformation could lead to more election-related fakes as mid-term elections in 2022 become more clear.
Trump won about 35 percent support from Latin American voters, according to VoteCast, a National Associated Press poll. That helped him dominate Florida, even while losing Arizona.
Kumar said that during the presidential race, misinformation in Spanish with Latin American roots would usually touch Florida and “anything,” and would go to Texas before reaching Arizona and New Mexico.
Now researchers will look to see if misinformation spreads across congressional districts. This could serve to ultimately discourage the Latino presence in the middle of the period.
Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, a Democratic strategist in Florida who monitors Spanish-language misinformation groups, said that since the election, those who spread them have been following the Biden administration on a daily basis and building false narratives around current events.
Brazilian Americans, for example, obtained manipulated videos from a democratic primary presidential debate when Biden suggested he would raise $ 20 billion to help Brazil fight Amazon deforestation, making it appear that Biden was ready to send American troops to that country.
Disinformation continued at such a furious pace after the election that Latin American progressive groups for more than 20 years drafted a letter in January urging Spanish-language radio stations and other Florida outlets to fight back. this practice.
Pérez-Verdía, one of the signatories, later said that “it has not decreased. Now I think it’s actually doubled. ”