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.
Videos and pictures were doctored. Quotes were taken out of context. Conspiracy theories were fanned, including that voting by mail was rigged, that the Black Lives Matter movement had ties to witchcraft and that Biden was beholden to a cabal of socialists. While much of the material is coming from domestic sources such as Spanish-speaking social media “influencers,” it increasingly originating on online sites in Latin America, those studying it closely say.
YouTube, Facebook and other social media companies have cracked down on false claims since before the election and intensified such efforts after online conspiracy theories helped incite the Trump loyalists who attacked the Capitol. “The Spanish-language space has been a bit of a blind spot for researchers for awhile now," said Bret Schafer, a disinformation expert at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which works to combat online efforts to weaken democratic institutions. "This field exploded after 2016 and, the vast majority of us who are in it, more of us speak Russian than Spanish.”
A video with a similar message appears to have originated in Panama, and another came from the Middle East but had been translated into Spanish. All moved into the U.S. via text chains or internet messaging from people with family and friends in Latin America, Kumar said. Democrats blame misinformation efforts for helping Trump win larger-than-expected shares of Latino support in normally reliably blue areas. But quantifying that is difficult.
Misinformation may have helped fuel significant gains in Latino support for Trump in some Venezuelan American and Colombian American areas, where voters were especially wary of claims that Biden was soft on socialism. That bump might be attributable to the heavy concentration of energy and law enforcement jobs in South Texas, and Trump’s promises to secure the border and promote fossil fuels. But misinformation also deeply penetrated the area, Perez said.
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