Lies usually have a greater reach than truths. They are much faster. A phenomenon that globalization has triggered. Misinformation is spreading more and more quickly across countries and continents via social networks and other communication channels. False reports that usually cause great confusion in the media surrounding current events: the war in Gaza and the resulting geopolitical tensions with Israel and other countries, the elections in Argentina or the announcement of new immigration laws in the United States; Events that are currently keeping the world in suspense
From different coordinates around the planet, fact-checkers track their journey and create content with evidence to deny the most viral fake news. These usually revolve around the same topics: politics, war conflicts, health… and affect the rights of citizens, especially those of a few. “The Spanish-speaking community in the United States is particularly at risk,” said Tamoa Calzadilla, a Venezuelan journalist and one of the founders of Factchequeado, a platform that tracks misinformation that most affects Spanish speakers and fights media poisoning in the country. American, an information desert in Spanish.
Latinos make up nearly 20% of the U.S. population, “but they are orphaned by news in their language,” Calzadilla says. Quality journalism in Spanish is a very scarce commodity and is hardly funded. “Translations from English are usually of poor quality and do not take into account the way Latinos express themselves. And the sections aimed at them will be the first to be cut if the media suffers cuts,” he explains.
Disinformation agents exploit these information gaps to spread false or misleading content “that undermines democratic institutions, impairs immigration rights, access to voting, or health care,” Calzadilla points out. Last September, for example, conservative speakers and Republican politicians pushed a misleading narrative claiming that the Democratic Party had proposed allowing abortions for any reason up to the ninth month of pregnancy. “Something totally false and that was widely spread in Spanish,” clarifies the member of Factchequeado.
In addition to linguistics, the Hispanic community faces many other barriers to accessing reliable sources and information, “which exposes them to certain dangers, as the pandemic has clearly demonstrated,” Calzadilla says. Not only have the narratives about the safety of the Covid-19 vaccines been among the most widespread and with the greatest impact on social networks around the world, they have also had very serious consequences for many citizens in the United States, as reported in 2021 by a Analysis of First Draft, a project against online misinformation founded in 2015 by some of the most important data companies such as Google.
According to this study, vaccine misinformation has had serious consequences for Latinos, who are 2.8 times more likely to be hospitalized for Covid-19 and 2.3 times more likely to die from the disease than non-Hispanic whites. Fake news caused great confusion and completely unscientific rumors: alternative treatments to cure the infection “or absurd claims such as that vaccines contained microchips that altered DNA or were made from aborted fetuses and were the work of the Antichrist,” explains Calzadilla as an example.
As Pablo Hernández, journalist and academic research coordinator at Maldita, a pioneering Spanish fake news detection and content verification platform, explains: “The pandemic has been a before and after in the viralization of fake news. The amount of disinformative messages posted on social networks and messaging apps such as WhatsApp with supposed miracle cures to fight the virus was enormous.” Fake news that influences the making of important decisions “and that can be the difference between life and death,” adds Calzadilla.
In addition to problems accessing accurate health information, language barriers also facilitate the spread of other types of false news among Spanish speakers, who simultaneously constitute many different communities. “They are citizens who experience very difficult social realities that are exploited by misinformation narratives. We see this all the time in migration news,” denounces the journalist from Factchequeado, a platform that has teamed up with Maldita to analyze in detail what type of misinformation is particularly damaging to Latino communities in the United States.
“In a survey we conducted, all journalists reporting on issues in Spanish expressed concern about the confusing messages being spread around immigration policies and processes. This is some of the most dangerous fake news. Because of the cumbersome information that usually reaches Spanish speakers, but also because of the fear of deportation,” says Hernández.
“It is very easy to play on this fear when the bureaucratic processes surrounding immigration laws are complicated and almost always conducted in English,” Calzadilla clarifies. Last May, his organization worked tirelessly to deny a video that was circulating on all networks warning of the massive expulsion of Latinos from Florida due to the new immigration law. “The video was recorded in another year and actually showed citizens fleeing Hurricane Ian,” explains the Venezuelan, citing another recent example: “All the misinformation that comes with the highly controversial reform of immigration law.” Immigrants without Papers in Texas that do not affect other states like California, but there is an attempt to distribute them as if they would affect the immigration status of Latinos living there.”
“This type of fake news reaches them through applications that they use every day to communicate with their families and through which they learn about current events,” explains Hernández. According to a study by Factchequeado, Hispanics and Latinos not only spend more time on social networks, but they are also more than twice as likely to use messaging applications such as Telegram and WhatAapp. “In fact, this is the most popular network for communicating and receiving information,” emphasizes Calzadilla. “It is an application that makes it very easy to inject fake news, especially for those who live in a country from which they do not originally come and use free channels to communicate with those they left behind, and not to lose their roots.” “This circumstance makes them very vulnerable to misinformation,” the Spanish journalist clarifies and warns of a key factor in the virality of fake news: addressing the emotional component.
“During the pandemic, we all watched the news and emotions ran high. Especially because there was no reliable information to fall back on, not even from leading organizations like the WHO. “So any content that came from someone you trusted, a friend, a cousin, was very credible,” explains the Maldita researcher, identifying certain patterns of hoaxes that reach around the world. “One goal of misinformation is to evoke an emotional response and cause the recipient to respond immediately without thinking about whether what they are sharing is a lie or the truth.”
Fake news also uses the manipulation of a narrative in the most current international context. “When global interest is focused on a specific event, misinformation occurs much more quickly. “The war in Ukraine made us realize that when the media focuses on one topic, misinformation skyrockets!” explains Hernández.
When the Russian invasion took place in February 2020 and news about the war began to spread virally, the Maldita team decided to launch Ukrainefacts, a tool to deny the many false content circulating on social networks: images from the past , from other conflicts , from events unrelated to other wars and even from video games. “The same hoaxes appeared in different countries with very little time difference,” says the journalist. If his team estimated that it could take weeks for any disinformation to travel from one country to another, in this case it spread virally in different parts of the world at the same time. Disinformation circulating in 17 countries at the same time on the same day.
“Although techniques and dynamics are repeated to spread the same hoax in different places, it is very difficult to carry out global analyzes of the same disinformation because it takes on local characteristics in each country,” says Hernández. It's been proven, he says, “that the spread of this misinformation by an influencer or a public figure has a huge impact on the entire world.” In 2020, then-President Donald Trump defended the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat coronavirus. Symptoms “even though the health authorities did not support this,” Calzadilla cites as an example. “For someone with so much influence and authority to publicly support this kind of information only makes the problem worse and more dangerous,” agrees the Maldita journalist. On October 11, the White House had to deny a statement by Joe Biden in which he claimed to have seen a video of Israeli babies being beheaded by Hamas. Politicians and current analysts from around the world made statements about it from their personal accounts, but no one could prove its existence.
“It is very complicated to follow the trail of such news with such great emotional impact and global influence. Often the same hoax is repeated word for word in different places, but we must homogenize the databases of the different fact-checkers in other countries and look for collaborations to have a complete vision,” explains Hernández, the Maldito journalist who has a goal ambitious : create a kind of silk card for disinformation. Currently, its platform already has various allies in Latin America and the United States, such as Factchequeado. This collaboration between Spanish and Latin American trackers gave rise to initiatives such as LatamChequea, which has already managed to bring together 32 media companies from 15 countries.
“In an environment like that of the United States, where there continues to be a lack of information in Spanish, it is important that more and more journalists come together to fight against fake news,” adds Calzadilla. As the Venezuelan recalls, “the lives of citizens are determined by the politics of the country in which they live, it is limited by a very specific context.” But false reports that cause so much damage know no borders.”
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