Desinformación: Responding to Targeted Spanish-Language Misinformation
About 40 percent of Latin people polled in the United States saying they believed in the false overarching narrative that the Democrats engage in election fraud, a 2024 poll conducted by Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas found. Photo by Spencer Platt / Getty Images
Brennan Center for Justice
Spanish-speaking communities in the United States are uniquely vulnerable to the unmitigated spread of election misinformation. These communities face risks other communities do not: misinformation often exploits their unique socio-political experiences, and social media companies typically engage in poor moderation of Spanish-language election falsehoods.
For example, in the final stretch of the 2020 presidential race, Donald Trump’s campaign ran a Spanish-language ad on YouTube that was shown more than 100,000 times in Florida over just eight days. The ad falsely depicted the political party aligned with Nicolas Maduro, the authoritarian leader of Venezuela, as supporting Joe Biden. It appeared to be part of a larger effort by the Trump campaign in Florida, a state with a large Venezuelan community, to connect Biden to Latin-American authoritarians like Maduro and Fidel Castro.
The Maduro ad illustrates how Spanish-language misinformation often reflects cultural specificities and is targeted towards distinct communities. The best way to combat the complexity of this misinformation is through well-resourced and culturally informed efforts.
While Spanish misinformation can closely mimic counterfeit narratives that started in English — such as the false claim that Kamala Harris cannot be president due to her foreign-born parents — other kinds of misinformation narratives are aimed at specific groups in specific geographies and involve issues that are distinctly relevant to them. For instance, false narratives portraying Democratic candidates as communists, which have spread among Spanish-speaking audiences in the United States in 2024 and in prior elections, can especially resonate with voters who have fled populist dictatorships abroad.
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