WASHINGTON (AP) – Tom Perez was invited to a Spanish-language radio show in Las Vegas last year, when a caller launched unfounded complaints about both sides, urging Latin listeners not to broadcast. votes.
Perez, then chairman of the Democratic Party, acknowledged many of the claims as points of conversation for #WalkAway, a group promoted by conservative activist Brandon Straka, who was later arrested for participating in the deadly January 6 uprising at the United States Capitol.
In the run-up to the November election, this call was part of a broader movement to reduce turnout and spread misinformation about Democrat Joe Biden among Latinos. She was promoted on social media and often fed by automated accounts.
The effort demonstrated how social media and other technologies can be harnessed to spread misinformation so quickly that those trying to stop it cannot continue. There were signs that worked in the presidential race, as Donald Trump cast a large number of Latin votes in some areas that had been democratic redoubts.
Videos and pictures were made. The quotes were taken out of context. Conspiracy theories were ventured, including postal voting, the Black Lives Matter movement had links to witchcraft, and Biden was seen by a cabal of socialists.
These flows of misinformation have only intensified since election day, researchers and political analysts say, prompting Trump’s unfounded claims that the election was stolen and false narratives around the crowd that dominated the Capitol.
More recently, it has been transformed into efforts to undermine coronavirus vaccination efforts.
“The volume and sources of information in Spanish are very wide and that should scare everyone,” Perez said.
The funding and organizational structure of this effort is unclear, although the messages show loyalty to Trump and opposition to Democrats.
A report released last week said most of the Spanish-language community’s false narratives were “translated from English and distributed through prominent platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, as well as on chat platforms in closed group like WhatsApp, efforts that often seemed coordinated across platforms “.
“The most prominent and shared narratives were closely aligned or completely reproduced from right-wing media,” said the report by researchers at Stanford University, Washington University, the social media analysis firm Graphika and the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, which studies online misinformation around the world.
Straka said in an email that nothing from the #WalkAway Campaign “encourages people not to vote.” He declined further comment.
Although much of the material comes from national sources, it increasingly originates from online sites in Latin America.
The misinformation originally promoted in English translates into places like Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, and Nicaragua, and then reaches Hispanic voters in the U.S. through communications from their relatives in those countries. It is often shared via private WhatsApp and Facebook chats and text strings, and is usually small and targeted enough to be difficult to prevent.
“There is this growing concern that this is 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 for the National Security Council. .
Those who originate these campaigns in Latin America often cannot vote in the United States, but they can influence the families in that country.
Kevin McAlister, a spokesman for Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, said last month the company announced a policy to remove the most responsible accounts for spreading misinformation about the coronavirus vaccine and other vaccines, and that it has now removed millions of content.
WhatsApp now limits the ability of users to send heavily forwarded messages to more than one chat at a time. This has led to a 70% reduction in the number of these messages.
With the election behind them, advocates of disinformation campaigns are now trying to spread the chaos more widely, especially by trying to create doubts about vaccines. Maria Teresa Kumar, president and CEO of Voto Latino, who works to promote Hispanic voting and political engagement across the country, has personal experience.
Her mother runs a nursing home in northern California and spent weeks planning to give up the COVID-19 vaccine because a friend at a gym had shown her a video circulating on the networks. social. In it, a woman wearing a lab coat and claiming to be a pharmacist in El Salvador says in Spanish that these vaccines are not safe.
Another shared narrative from Latin America to the United States included a video doctorate of the late Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis who allegedly fired Dr. Anthony Fauci, the U.S.’s top infectious disease expert, as a “counterfeiter.” who knows nothing about virology. ”
Vaccine misinformation may lead to more election-related falsehoods as the 2022 midterm elections become clearer.
Trump garnered about 35 percent of Latino voter support, according to VoteCast, an Associated Press poll in the national electorate. This helped him prevail in Florida, even as he lost Arizona.
Kumar said that during the presidential race, misinformation in Spanish with Latin American roots used to affect Florida first and “whatever sticks” and go to Texas, before reaching Arizona and New Mexico.
Researchers will now look at whether misinformation spreads among congressional districts. This could serve to discourage Latin participation in the medium term.
Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, a Florida Democratic strategist who has been monitoring disinformation groups in Spanish, said that since the election, those who disseminated it have been monitoring the Biden administration on a daily basis and building false narratives around the ‘actuality.
Brazilian Americans, for example, have gotten a manipulated video of a Democratic presidential debate when Biden suggested he would raise $ 20 billion to help Brazil combat Amazon deforestation, which sounds like Biden was willing to send American troops to that country.
Disinformation has continued at such a furious pace after the election that more than 20 Latino progressive groups drafted a January letter urging Spanish-language radio stations and other Florida outlets to crack down on the practice.
Pérez-Verdía, one of the signatories, later said that “it has not fallen. Now I think it has actually doubled. “