Misinformation campaign — votes to virus — targets Latinos
WASHINGTON — Tom Perez was a guest on a Spanish-language talk radio show in Las Vegas last year when a caller launched into baseless complaints about both parties, urging Latino listeners to not cast votes at all.
Perez, then chairman of the Democratic Party, recognized many of the claims as talking points for #WalkAway, a group promoted by a conservative activist, Brandon Straka, who was later arrested for participating in the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
In the run-up to the November election, that call was part of a broader movement to depress turnout and spread disinformation about Democrat Joe Biden among Latinos, It was promoted on social media and often fueled by automated accounts.
The effort showed how social media and other technology can be leveraged to spread misinformation so quickly that those trying to stop it cannot keep up. There were signs that it worked in the presidential race as Donald Trump swung large numbers of Latino votes in some areas that had been Democratic strongholds.
Videos and pictures were doctored. Quotes were taken out of context. Conspiracy theories were fanned, including that voting by mail was rigged, the Black Lives Matter movement had ties to witchcraft and Biden was beholden to a cabal of socialists.
That flow of misinformation has only intensified since Election Day, researchers and political analysts say, stoking Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen and false narratives around the mob that overran the Capitol.
More recently, it has morphed into efforts to undermine vaccination efforts against the coronavirus.
“The volume and sources of Spanish language information are exceedingly wide-ranging and that should scare everyone,” Perez said.
The funding and the organizational structure of this effort isn’t clear, although the messages show a fealty to Trump and opposition to Democrats.
A report released this past week said most false narratives in the Spanish-language community “were translated from English and circulated via prominent platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, as well as in closed group chat platforms like WhatsApp, efforts that often appeared coordinated across platforms.”
“The most prominent narratives and those shared were either closely aligned with or completely repurposed from right-wing media outlets,” said the report by researchers from Stanford University, the University of Washington, the social network analysis firm Graphika and Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, which studies disinformation online around the world.
Straka said via email that nothing from the #WalkAway Campaign “encourages people not to vote.”
While much of the material is coming from domestic sources, it increasingly originating on online sites in Latin America.
Misinformation originally promoted in English is translated in places such as Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and Nicaragua, then reaches Hispanic voters in the U.S. via communications from their relatives in those countries. That is often shared via private WhatsApp and Facebook chats and text chains, and is usually small and targeted enough to be difficult to prevent.
“There’s this growing concern that this is very much part of the immigrant and first-generation information environment for a lot of Latinos in the United States,” said Dan Restrepo, former senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council.
Those originating such campaigns in Latin America often cannot vote in the U.S., but can influence family in this country who do.
Kevin McAlister, a spokesman at Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, said that last month they announced a policy removing accounts responsible for spreading misinformation about the coronavirus vaccine and other vaccines,andhasnowtakendown millions of pieces of content.
WhatsApp now limits users’ ability to send highly forwarded messages to more than one chat at a time. That has led to a 70% reduction in the number of such messages.
Now researchers will be watching to see if misinformation spreads between congressional districts. That could serve to ultimately discourage Latino turnout in the midterms.
Evelyn Pérez-Verdía a Florida Democratic strategist who has been monitoring disinformation groups in Spanish, said that since the election, those spreading it have been watching the Biden administration daily and building false narratives around current events.