Lies usually have greater reach than truths. They spread much faster, a phenomenon that has been exacerbated by globalization. Misinformation spreads more and more quickly across countries and continents through social media and other channels of information. Hoaxes tend to create a lot of media confusion around current events, such as the war on Gaza and the geopolitical tensions between Israel and other countries, the recent elections in Argentina, or the announcement of new immigration laws in the United States. Events that currently have the world in suspense can be twisted by fake news.
From different coordinates across the planet, fact-checkers trace the journey of fake news and create evidence-based content to debunk the most viral hoaxes. These scams usually always revolve around the same themes: politics, armed conflicts, health and human rights.
“The Spanish-speaking community in the United States is especially vulnerable,” explains Tamoa Calzadilla, a Venezuelan journalist and one of the founders of Factchequeado — a platform that tracks the misinformation that most affects Spanish speakers. The organization is fighting back against the toxic media that’s poisoning America, a country that’s a desert of information when it comes to Spanish.
Hispanic citizens represent almost 20% of the U.S. population, “but they’re orphaned by news in their language,” Calzadilla notes. Quality journalism in Spanish is a very scarce commodity and barely has funding. “Translations from English are usually of poor quality… they don’t take into account the way in which Latinos express themselves. And the sections aimed at them are the first to be eliminated when the media suffers from budget cuts,” she explains.
Agents of disinformation churn out content “that undermines democratic institutions, affects human rights, immigration, access to voting, or health care,” Calzadilla emphasizes. This past September, for example, conservative groups and Republican politicians pushed a false narrative in which they claimed that the Democratic Party had proposed allowing abortion — under any circumstances — up to the ninth month of pregnancy. “Something completely false, which was widely spread in Spanish,” Calzadilla clarifies.
In addition to the language factor, many members of the Hispanic community face other barriers to accessing reliable sources of information. “This exposes them to certain dangers, as the pandemic clearly demonstrated,” Calzadilla affirms. The narratives about the safety of the Covid-19 vaccines were among the most popular and impactful hoaxes that circulated on social media, taking a serious toll on many American citizens. This was explained in 2021 by an analysis from 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, misinformation about vaccines brought about serious consequences for Latinos, who were 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 generated widespread confusion and unscientific rumors, such as alternative treatments to cure the infection, “or absurd claims,
[alleging] that the vaccines contained microchips, altered DNA, or were made from aborted fetuses and were the work of the Antichrist,” Calzadilla laments.
Pablo Hernández is a journalist. He’s also an academic research coordinator at Maldita, a pioneering Spanish language platform that detects fake news and verifies content. He explains that the pandemic “was a before and after in the viralization of hoaxes. The amount of disinformation posted on social media and messaging applications like WhatsApp — with supposed miraculous remedies to deal with the virus — was tremendous.” When hoaxes influence the making of important decisions, “that can mean life or death,” Calzadilla adds.
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