The Republican vice presidential candidate, JD Vance, stated in the television debate on October 1 that there are between 20 and 25 million undocumented migrants in the United States. It’s false. Estimates range between 11 and 16 million. His rival, Democrat Tim Walz, assured that for the 2025 project Donald Trump will make a pregnancy registry if he becomes president. It is also false.
Politicians lie blatantly – some more than others – to millions of people in their quest to get the vote, and although no one is free from being deceived, the Latino community has certain peculiarities that make it more vulnerable. The scarcity of information in Spanish and the massive use among Hispanics of the WhatsApp messaging application makes them a perfect target for the spread of fake news.
“The Latino voting bloc is growing and there is too much misinformation in Spanish. We feel the responsibility to teach them what is false or misleading and give them the correct information so that they can vote,” explains Miriam Valverde, deputy editor of PolitiFact, an organization dedicated to fact-checking that last year, with a view to the electoral campaign , began its activity in Spanish.
This entity has attached the labels “true”, “mostly true”, “half true”, “mostly false”, “false” and “ridiculous and false” to more than 25,000 pieces of information since it began operating in 2007. For They resort to published data, studies and experts who can clarify the issues.
The workload is abundant when one of the people with the most media presence is Donald Trump. “Kamala Harris allowed in 13,099 convicted murderers and opposes any effort to locate and expel them”; Harris “even wants to legalize fentanyl”; When Haitians go to school in Ohio “they take away our children’s jobs and each one will have an interpreter.” All of them are statements by the Republican candidate made in the last three weeks at campaign events and all classified as “false” by the PolitiFact team.
Although the two presidential candidates have spread false or half-false information, Trump wins by a landslide. 38% of statements verified by PolitiFact are lies, compared to 16% of Harris’s. And the verified material of the former president is much more abundant: 1,057 verifications from the Republican and 59 from the Democrat.
Apart from campaign speeches, disinformation has a perfect channel to distribute it on social networks. Anyone can post homemade videos on them without a filter that censors them. PolitiFact in Spanish recently denounced the falsehood of a video broadcast on TikTok that showed the legend “Kamala Harris’ campaign is allegedly paying people $700 a week to travel and attend all their events!”
Latinos get more information through social networks than through other channels and that makes them more vulnerable to misinformation. Furthermore, they are a clear target because with more than 36 million voters, their choice in these elections can determine who will occupy the Oval Office for the next four years.
A peculiarity of this group is the widespread use of WhatsApp, which makes it more difficult to track the information, since it is done between private messages. “On this platform, a lot of information about the elections is shared and it is more difficult to correct it because we cannot always see what is circulating. It is like a closed circuit and if the news is shared without verification it can be very harmful,” Valverde acknowledges.
It is very common for Latinos to communicate with their family and friends who are in their countries of origin through WhatsApp. “There is disinformation in Spanish that reaches these diaspora communities through a channel as difficult to monitor as WhatsApp and that goes under the radar of the institutions and organizations that focus on fighting the disinformation that is spread in Spanish. English”, collects a study by Factchequeado, another organization dedicated to verification in Spanish that was founded in 2022.
Every week they hold a meeting in which their “allies” participate, and they decide the issues they are going to investigate, also proposed by their audience. Rafael Olavarría, a Venezuelan resident in Atlanta and fact checker specializing in politics for Factchequeado, creates videos on TikTok and other networks to expose false information to Latinos in a way that is not boring.
Kamala Harris, communist?
In one of his educational videos, Olavarría has a conversation with himself to deny that Kamala Harris is a communist, wondering if their proposals are those of that ideology.
Olavarría affirms that Latinos are more exposed to misleading information and “the tendency for them to believe misinformation is greater the more political content they consume on the networks and the more polarized they are.” One of the most widespread resources by Republicans to gain followers in the Latino community is to label the Democratic Party as socialist or communist. With this they manage to connect with those who have arrived in the United States fleeing regimes such as those of Cuba, Venezuela or Nicaragua.
One of the lies circulating online that PolitiFact verified was the claim that Harris had a Communist Party card. The investigation revealed that it had been done on a Russian website that anyone can access.
Another tactic is to take news out of context. Valverde gives the example of information that appeared on a satire website in which it was said that Harris’ teachers had designated her as the worst student they had. Someone took a screenshot of it and, without detailing that it was a joke, they spread it on the networks. “People share information from this type of pages without specifying that they are out of context,” he clarifies.
Issues related to immigration are very common in misinformation, such as the hoax that Harris was named “border czar.” Likewise, “there are lawyers and organizations that try to take advantage of Latinos who are not clear about their rights and obligations in immigration matters or do not know the administrative processes they have to carry out, and ‘notaries’ who offer services that, in reality, they cannot offer,” they explain from Factchequeado.
The problem is that once the information has been disseminated and enters that infinite space in which the news multiplies exponentially, checking it requires time, when the damage has already been done. “The challenge we have factcheckers It’s that we are three steps further behind misinformation. The information is very easy to create and then it takes us about two days to research it,” admits Olavarría.
Experts in detecting misleading information recommend that information be verified before forwarding it. There are some clues that can help us discover them. “When a publication surprises or provokes anger, be careful, these are signs that it is misinformation. Before sharing, ask yourself where it came from and what its intention was,” advises Valverde.
#Misinformation #affects #Latinos #due #language #barrier #WhatsApp