WASHINGTON (AP) – Tom Perez was invited to a Spanish radio program in Las Vegas last year, when a person called unsubstantiated complaints about both parties, asking Latin listeners not to vote.
Perez, then president 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 January 6 uprising on the United States Capitol .
In the run-up to the November election, this call was part of a broader movement to decrease participation and spread disinformation about Democrat Joe Biden among Latinos. It was promoted on social networks and often powered by automated accounts.
The effort showed how social media and other technologies can be harnessed to spread disinformation so quickly that those who try to stop it cannot keep up. There were signs that it worked in the presidential race, as Donald Trump won a large number of Latin votes in some areas that had been Democratic strongholds.
Videos and photos have been modified. The quotes were taken out of context. Conspiracy theories were widespread, including that the postal vote was rigged, the Black Lives Matter movement was linked to witchcraft, and Biden was indebted to a conspiracy by socialists.
This flow of misinformation has only intensified since election day, say researchers and political analysts, fueling Trump’s baseless claims that the election was stolen and false narratives surrounding the crowd that invaded the Capitol.
More recently, it has turned into efforts to undermine coronavirus vaccination efforts.
“The volume and the sources of information in Spanish are extremely comprehensive and that should frighten everyone,” said Perez.
The funding and organizational structure of this effort is unclear, although the messages show loyalty to Trump and opposition to the Democrats.
A report released last week said that most of the false narratives in the Spanish-speaking community “were translated from English and circulated on major platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, as well as on closed group chat platforms like WhatsApp, efforts that often seemed coordinated across platforms. “
“The most prominent and shared narratives have been closely aligned or completely reused by the right-wing media,” said the report by researchers at Stanford University, University of Washington, social media analytics company Graphika and Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, which studies disinformation online around the world.
Straka said by email that nothing in the #WalkAway campaign “encourages people not to vote”. He declined further comments.
Although much of the material comes from domestic sources, it increasingly originates from online sites in Latin America.
The misinformation originally promoted in English is translated into places like Colombia, Brazil, Mexico and Nicaragua, and then reaches Hispanic voters in the United States through communications from their relatives in those countries. This is usually shared via private WhatsApp and Facebook chats and text strings, and is usually small and targeted enough to be difficult to prevent.
“There is 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 for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the National Security Council.
Those who originate from such campaigns in Latin America generally cannot vote in the United States, but they can influence the family in this country.
Kevin McAlister, Facebook spokesman, owner of WhatsApp, said that last month the company announced a policy of removing accounts most responsible for spreading misinformation about the coronavirus vaccine and other vaccines, and has now removed millions of pieces of content.
WhatsApp now limits users’ ability to send highly forwarded messages to more than one chat at a time. This led to a 70% reduction in the number of these messages.
With the elections supported, proponents of disinformation campaigns are now trying to spread chaos more widely, mainly trying to raise 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 stop being vaccinated against COVID-19 because a friend at a gym showed her a video that circulated on social media. 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 USA featured adulterated video of the afternoon, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis allegedly dismissing Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s leading infectious disease specialist, as a “fake who doesn’t know anything about virology “.
Disinformation of the vaccine may revert to more falsehoods related to the elections as the 2022 midterm elections become clearer.
Trump won about 35% of the support of Latin voters, according to VoteCast, an Associated Press poll with the national electorate. This helped him win in Florida, even losing Arizona.
Kumar said that during the presidential race, misinformation in Spanish with Latin American roots usually hits Florida first and “whatever sticks, it spills over” and goes to Texas, before reaching Arizona and New Mexico.
Now, researchers will be watching to see if misinformation spreads among constituencies. This could serve to discourage Latinos from attending intermediate tests.
Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, a Democratic strategist from Florida who monitors disinformation groups in Spanish, said that since the election, those who disclose it observe the Biden government daily and construct false narratives about current events.
Brazilian-Americans, for example, obtained a rigged video of a Democratic presidential debate in the primaries, when Biden suggested that he would raise $ 20 billion to help Brazil fight deforestation in the Amazon, which makes it appear that Biden was ready to send American troops to that country.
Disinformation continued at such a furious pace after the election that more than 20 progressive Latin groups wrote a letter in January urging Spanish-speaking radio stations and other media in Florida to crack down on the practice.
Pérez-Verdía, one of the signatories, said afterwards that “it has not decreased. I now consider that it has actually doubled. “