Spanish-language disinformation growing with escalating political rhetoric

Lea este artículo en español aquí.

Communists. Election fraud. Great replacement.  

With just days to go before the midterms, the tone of political rhetoric is rising and bringing a heavy dose of disinformation with it, including in Spanish, where false claims are percolating among one of the fastest-growing electorates.

Much of it is seeking to cast doubt on the validity of the U.S. voting process while pushing a number of false narratives from fringe media. 

“We’ve been seeing claims that are kind of anticipating election fraud,” said M. Estrada, a researcher with Media Matters who uses only their first initial professionally, adding that many purveyors of election-related disinformation were “getting ready to spew similar narratives” seen in 2020. 

In either language, disinformation spreads through a broad ecosystem composed of multiple platforms, ranging from mainstream campaign ads to online platforms to individual social media accounts.  

And while it’s common for disinformation to surge ahead of an election, that process is only accelerating in Spanish media, according to researchers. 

In the case of Spanish-language conservative fringe media, it’s replicating trends seen in English-language conservative media, teeing up familiar false claims about widespread voter fraud.  

Media Matters this month found dozens more videos promoting false narratives about election fraud, including promoting debunked claims about ballot dumping in Georgia. Collectively, the new videos they identified racked up more than 1.6 million views combined. 

But Spanish language disinformation is not confined to the voting process. 

Gender politics are heavily featured in disinformation campaigns, often accusing Democrats of encouraging sex changes in minors. Abortion and the potential for late-term abortions are also a common theme, as is false data on supposed dangers of immigration or on general criminality. 

Disinformation on immigration in particular can seek to divide the Hispanic community, pitting the native-born and the established immigrants against more recent arrivals.

The so-called Great Replacement Theory, a false narrative that elites are attempting to “replace” white Americans with foreign, nonwhite voters, has popped up in Spanish-language conservative media.

Among conspiracy theories, the Great Replacement Theory has proven particularly deadly — the theory has been a motivating factor in at least three racially motivated mass murders, the 2019 mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Christchurch, New Zealand, and the 2022 Buffalo, N.Y. shooting.

The varying content is thriving on YouTube, where wannabe TV personalities stream their own shows, as well as viral posts on social media and even chat apps like WhatsApp.  

“People have long been talking about Spanish language as an underrepresented kind of avenue of investigation and research,” said Lee Foster, senior vice president for analysis at Alethea Group, a private company that tracks disinformation.  

“Spanish language disinformation is a problem, but historically, within this space, it has not been well studied or investigated to the same extent as English disinformation.” 

A look at Factchequeado, a bilingual fact-checking site aimed at battling disinformation in the U.S., shows the variety of disinformation circulating among Spanish speakers. 

“No, Colorado hasn’t sent 30,000 ballots to undocumented immigrants,” reads one article. Biden didn’t “gift” thousands of smartphones to migrants, it explains in another. “No, California doesn’t allow gender transition surgery for children without the permission of their parents,” the site says in a third. 

Tamoa Calzadilla, the site’s managing editor, said the Spanish-speaking community faces the same barrage of disinformation as English speakers, but often without the same resources to counter it. And while English-language disinformation is often more quickly removed when it’s flagged, disinformation can linger online for longer in other languages, with social media companies still fine-tuning their systems to remove problematic content that isn’t in English. 

“They are more vulnerable. Because in English you have a lot of good information with newspapers or more than 10 fact checking platforms in English. But in Spanish, they have less good content to arm themselves. And they are informing themselves through YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and WhatsApp. And these platforms are not warning people to the extent they are doing in English,” Calzadilla said. 

Democrats are especially concerned about election-related disinformation coming from the right, whether it’s discrediting the validity of elections or doling out false information on how to vote. They see the tactics as potentially scaring off Latinos from voting.  

“It’s not necessarily even to try to persuade Latinos to vote for Republicans. It’s just more to confuse them and try and just discourage them from voting at all,” said Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), the head of Bold PAC, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus campaign arm.  

That group is getting ready to debut a get-out-the-vote campaign countering fake information regarding voting procedures and requirements. 

“Whenever there’s disinformation when it comes to elections, election dates and election voting process, it’s really important that we call that out,” said Gallego. 

“Number two, there’s also just outright lies. For example, we’re hearing different Republicans as well as Republican leaning groups, saying that the Democrats are trying to get your kids to take hormone blockers and trying to de-genderize your kids, this is all bullshit,” he added.

Overall, the right and left measure the distance between spin and disinformation with different yardsticks.

Asked to provide examples of Spanish-language disinformation from the left, Republican National Committee Communications Director Danielle Alvarez pointed to Democratic policies toward Hispanic communities.

“Hispanics are being disproportionately affected by Democrats’ agenda of higher taxes, open borders, rising crime, and out-of-control inflation. Democrats’ attempts to spin, backtrack, and lie to the Hispanic community about their track record of failures is disrespectful and shows how little they think of our community,” said Alvarez.

Republicans also deny that they benefit from the disinformation that Democrats accuse them of peddling, particularly in Spanish. 

According to a national poll of likely Hispanic voters by Republican firm Bienvenido, Hispanics who get their news in Spanish have on average become more liberal over the past five years. 

“We really wanted us to see, ‘is disinformation driving Hispanics toward Republicans?’ The focus has been on Spanish language disinformation. Honestly, we found no evidence of this. In 2020, President Trump lost those who get their news in Spanish by 40 points. He performed much better with those who got to get their news in English,” said Giancarlo Sopo, a Republican political consultant. 

Many of the Hispanics who prefer their news in Spanish are immigrants, and an entire subgenre of disinformation is targeted specifically at them, rather than just mirroring English-language content. 

This disinformation echoes common GOP talking points seeking to label a variety of Democratic policies as socialism or communism, but for a Latino audience, it seeks to draw comparisons to countries some of them may have fled. 

“We are seeing particularly a narrative that is targeted at Latino immigrants. You know, because it’s all about ‘this is socialism; this is communism; this is controlism.’ Because they say that, for example, this is as repressive an administration as Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua,” Calzadilla said, noting that a years old photo of President Biden with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro at an international summit has been newly circulating, falsely labeled as a photo from a recent meeting. 

“They are using this narrative to scare people that came from countries with dictatorships, from Venezuela, Nicaragua, from Cuba. Those people listen to these scary narratives about Democrat candidates. And you can see that it is targeted at these people.” 

Foster called it an effort “to play to those kinds of political concerns that exist as communities because of their actual political histories.”  

His research has found a number of popular YouTube channels were based in Colombia, even though they appeared to be actively targeting U.S. viewers.  

Foster said there was no indication the channels were backed by state actors, rather that disinformation peddling provided a format for making money. 

“What we did identify was certain indicators that suggested potential monetary motivation,” he said, noting the content included links for donations. 

“So it suggests certain financial incentives for pushing this content above a potential political motivation.”