How Misinformation Affects Spanish Speakers

Election misinformation is all over social media. Here’s just one example: On Aug. 5, five secretaries of state urged Elon Musk to fix Twitter’s AI chatbot after it produced and spread misinformation about ballot deadlines to millions of users for more than a week.

Though this kind of deceitful content affects everyone, a nationwide poll that Free Press Action commissioned found that daily Spanish speakers in the United States are more likely to experience the negative impacts of online misinformation — affirming years of research that finds Latinos are ripe targets for malicious actors.

Free Press Action Co-CEO Jessica J. Gonzàlez recently joined Sens. Ben Ray Luján and Alex Padilla for a Capitol Hill briefing to highlight this crisis of non-English disinformation — and to issue an urgent call for social-media platforms to beef up content moderation across all languages.

Here’s some of what Jessica shared.

What Spanish speakers encounter online: election misinformation, hate and more

Free Press Action’s poll findings shed light on the unique information environments of dominant Spanish speakers. We discovered the following:

• Daily Spanish speakers spend more time online, more time using social media and less time watching traditional TV compared to other U.S. adults.
• They are more frequent users of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube for news.
• They are far more likely to seek out culturally relevant news and information.
• Despite their higher levels of engagement with online news, daily Spanish speakers are more likely to say they don’t feel informed about local elections.
• As was the case with the rest of the poll’s respondents, nearly half (47 percent) of daily Spanish speakers report that they encounter stories they believe are misinformation “very often” or “some of the time.”

So Spanish speakers are spending more time online and more time searching for culturally relevant news — but are finding less information that meets their civic-information needs. They’re also feeling the effects of social-media companies’ lack of investment in Spanish-language content moderation. This means that more hate, more lies and more harassment are getting through to them.

This is nothing new. In fact, in prior election cycles, we found examples where social-media platforms removed English-language threats of violence about voting stations and political events — but kept this content up in Spanish. A 2022 study from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism found that fear of violence or harassment at the polls suppresses political participation. The report also found that Black and Latino people were far more likely to feel unsafe at the polls and far more likely to indicate that this could impact their willingness to vote.

So the media environment is not meeting Spanish speakers’ information needs — and is stirring up fear that in turn contributes to voter suppression.

How disinformation is weaponized

Today disinformation is becoming more personalized and individualized based on the mass quantities of demographic and behavioral data that tech companies and data brokers collect about us. We are being micro-targeted based on our perceived beliefs and vulnerabilities, and tech companies have failed to put effective safeguards in place to curb lies and hate. They’ve done even less to protect speakers of non-English languages. And the explosion of generative AI has made all of this even more dangerous.

What’s more, disinformation isn’t the only tactic that malign actors use to suppress the vote. What we’re seeing today is manipulation, an over-saturation of content pushed to people’s feeds that is driven to skew users’ political realities. People are so saturated with negative stories about the political process or politicians that they start to feel hopeless and may decide to sit out elections.

This over-saturation strategy can be micro-targeted based on a person’s data, and it feeds off algorithms that almost certainly aren’t designed to suppress voting — but that’s nonetheless the impact. Algorithms feed people content that gets them hooked. Malicious actors know this and exploit the algorithms to promote content that creates apathy.

To make matters worse, we have even fewer local reporters today than we did four years ago. In fact, over the past two decades, we have lost more than 50 percent of local reporters who cover statehouses, school boards, local races and ballot measures.

Job losses and newsroom closures have hit ethnic media especially hard. Without journalists to provide context, hate and lies often go unchecked.

What solutions do we need?

There’s no one remedy for this crisis. We need a whole array of solutions:

• Social-media platforms must do a better job of moderating content across languages. They must hold VIP accounts — accounts belonging to political figures, celebrities and other powerful figures — to the same standards as everyone else’s. They must combat election misinformation in all languages — and ban content that sows distrust in democratic institutions or our electoral process.
• Journalists must educate the public about the prevalence of online manipulation, and underscore how the problem is more acute in non-English languages. We need a media-wide effort to shine a light on these problems and hold malicious forces accountable.
• People, and especially those of us in non-English-speaking communities, must slow down in moments of crisis and chaos to ensure we’re getting the facts right. This Free Press guide to stopping the spread of misinformation is a great place to start.
• Congress must pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation to curb the rampant collection and retention of our personal data, and its use to target us and discriminate against us based on protected characteristics like race. But this alone won’t solve the problem.
• With an average of two local newspapers shutting down every single week, it’s time for lawmakers to address the decline of local journalism and its role in festering manipulation efforts. Independent journalism is a public good. It provides much-needed sunlight so that communities can try to make sense of the world around them. But we are losing more local reporters every day, and the market is not going to save journalism. We must invest public dollars into local, independent, nonprofit and ethnic media that meet communities’ needs and help people sort fact from fiction.

It’s time to ensure that non-English speakers finally have the protections from misinformation — and the access to trustworthy content — they deserve. Learn more about our poll to understand people’s beliefs about media, technology and democracy in an election year.

Help Free Press Action keep fighting misinformation: Donate today.