WASHINGTON (AP) – Tom Perez was a guest on a Spanish-speaking radio program in Las Vegas last year, when a caller started unfounded complaints about both parties and urged Latin listeners not to cast votes at all.
Perez, then chairman of the Democratic Party, acknowledged many of the allegations as talking points for #WalkAway, a group promoted by a conservative activist, Brandon Straka, who was later arrested for participating in the deadly uprising on 6 January at the American Capitol.
In the run-up to the November election, the call was part of a broader movement to suppress the turnout and spread disinformation about Democrat Joe Biden among Latinos. It has been promoted on social media and is often fueled by automated accounts.
The effort showed how social media and other technologies can be used to spread misinformation so quickly that those who try to stop it cannot keep up. There were signs that it worked in the presidential race, while Donald Trump waved a large number of Latino votes in some areas that were democratic strongholds.
Videos and photos have been doctored. Quotes have been ripped out of context. Conspiracy theories were aroused, including that the vote was deceived by mail, that the Black Lives Matter movement had ties to witchcraft, and that Biden was seen after a cabal of socialists.
The flow of misinformation has only increased since election day, say researchers and political analysts, who have fueled Trump’s unfounded allegations that the election was stolen, and false narratives surrounding the mob that overwhelmed the Capitol.
More recently, this has changed in efforts to undermine vaccination efforts against the coronavirus.
“The volume and resources of Spanish language information are extremely wide and it should frighten everyone,” Perez said.
The funding and organizational structure of this effort is not clear, although the messages show a liking for Trump and opposition to the Democrats.
A report released last week states that most of the fake stories in the Spanish community have been “translated from English and distributed via prominent platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, as well as in closed group chat platforms such as WhatsApp, efforts that often appeared coordinated across platforms. ”
“The most prominent and shared narratives have been carefully aligned with the right-wing media, or have been completely re-used,” read the report by researchers from Stanford University, the University of Washington, the social network analytics firm Graphika and the DFRLab of Atlantic Council , who study disinformation online around the world.
Straka said in an email that none of the #WalkAway campaign encourages people not to vote. He declined further comment.
Although much of the material comes from domestic sources, it is increasingly found on online sites in Latin America.
Misinformation originally promoted in English is translated into places like Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and Nicaragua, and then reaches Spanish voters in the US via communication from their family members in those countries. It is often shared via private WhatsApp and Facebook chats and text chains, and is usually small and targeted enough to be difficult to prevent.
“It is a growing concern that it 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 of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the National Security Council.
Those who come from such campaigns in Latin America often cannot vote in the US, but can influence the family in this country.
Kevin McAlister, a spokesman for Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, said the company announced a policy last month that removes accounts most responsible for spreading false information about the coronavirus vaccine and other vaccines, and that it has now removed millions of pieces of content.
WhatsApp now limits the ability of users to send highly forwarded messages to more than one chat at a time. This has led to a 70% reduction in the number of such messages.
With the election behind them, proponents of misinformation are now trying to spread chaos more widely, especially by raising doubts about vaccines. Maria Teresa Kumar, President and CEO of Voto Latino, which promotes Spanish voices and political involvement nationwide, has personal experience.
Her mother owns a nursing home in Northern California and has been planning to give up vaccination against COVID-19 for weeks because a friend at a gym showed her a video 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 story shared from Latin America to the US featured a doctored video of the late Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis, who dr. Anthony Fauci, the leading American expert in infectious diseases, dismissed as a ‘fool who knows nothing about virology’.
The information about the vaccine may return to more untruth with the election as the 2022 midterm elections become clearer.
According to VoteCast, a survey by the Associated Press among national voters, Trump received about 35% support from Latino voters. It helped him triumph in Florida, even while he lost to Arizona.
Kumar said that misinformation in Spanish with Latin American roots during the presidential race would usually hit Florida first and “whatever gets stuck, overshoot” and go to Texas before reaching Arizona and New Mexico.
Now researchers will look at whether misinformation is spreading among the districts in Congress. This could eventually discourage the rise of Latino in the middle period.
Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, a Democratic strategist in Florida who has been monitoring the disinformation groups in Spanish, said those who have been spreading it since the election have been watching the Biden government daily and building false narratives around current events.
Brazilian Americans, for example, manipulated videos of a Democratic presidential debate when Biden suggested he raise $ 20 billion to help Brazil fight Amazon’s deforestation, making it sound like Biden is ready to send US troops to the country. .
Misinformation continued at such an furious pace after the election that more than 20 progressive Latino groups drafted a January letter urging Spanish-speaking radio stations and other stores in Florida to curb the practice.
Pérez-Verdía, one of the signatories, then said that ‘it did not download. I now think it has actually doubled. ”