On Politics: What keeps Latino voting-rights activists up at night? Disinformation
Good evening! Tonight, my colleague Jazmine Ulloa has a look at why Latino voting rights activists are more worried than ever about the threat of disinformation. Plus, we look at how the Harris campaign is using technology to get to people who are hard to reach through traditional canvassing. — Jess Bidgood
What keeps Latino voting rights activists up at night? Disinformation.The latest, with 19 days to go
A year ago, while María Teresa Kumar was conducting focus groups with Latino voters in Arizona and Nevada, she began to hear eerily similar anti-American sentiments repeatedly crop up. Kumar had noticed videos and memes proliferating online that appeared to be sowing distrust in American government and participation in its democratic system. Had content like that, she wondered, reached these voters? Activists like Kumar, who runs Voto Latino, the largest organization dedicated to mobilizing young Hispanic voters in the United States, have been contending with disinformation targeting Latino voters since 2016. But this year, they say, nefarious material is more widespread, sophisticated and complex than ever — and they are trying to sound the alarm. Kumar's worries led her to raise the issue of disinformation aimed at Latinos with President Biden during a visit to the White House in the spring. He appeared to be aware of the problem and suggested that it was worse than they thought. "He said, 'You don't know the half of it,'" Kumar recalled. Worries about foreign influenceWhen it comes to disinformation and Latino voters, Kumar and other voting rights activists have a long list of concerns. The threat of foreign influence on this year's election is among them. In recent months, the Justice Department indicted an American commentator for Russian television and his wife. The United States has accused Russia's global television network, RT, of serving as an arm of that country's intelligence agencies, and social media companies have escalated their efforts to block content from the station and other Russian media outlets. Latino voting rights groups are hoping the increased scrutiny will shed more light on content that they say appears designed to manipulate Hispanic audiences. The Pew Research Center in March issued the latest of its studies showing that Latinos, who may prove to be a decisive voting group in November, are more likely to rely on social media outlets for news than Black or white people. That has made the electorate more likely than the general population to receive, consume and share misinformation. At the same time, Russian-owned media has emerged as a major purveyor of news across Mexico and Latin America, researchers said. "We see the influencers, we see the content creators, but we don't know who is funding them," said Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, the founder of We Are Más, a communications firm based in South Florida that tracks disinformation. Now that the government has opened cases into Russia's involvement in American media, she added, "the more we will know, the more we will see the trail." A flood of suspicious content aimed at LatinosDuring this year's presidential campaign, Latino voter rights groups have traced a flood of suspicious content, much of it in Spanish and on platforms like TikTok and WhatsApp, that has appeared to prop up little-known third-party candidates. Other material has echoed anti-American sentiments like those tracked by Ms. Kumar, fueling confusion or distrust in U.S. elections and disenchantment among Latinos with the U.S. government and the nation's two major parties. But the top concern for purveyors of disinformation this election cycle, according to the nonprofit News Literacy Project, which has cataloged examples of debunked falsehoods, has been misleading information about a candidate's character. Among the material targeted specifically at Latino voters have been several viral pieces falsely portraying Vice President Kamala Harris as a communist — a label that tends to stir fears among Latinos, particularly Cuban Americans and Venezuelan Americans in Florida, who fled communist and socialist governments across Latin America. Some started as jokes, but Peter Adams, a senior vice president of research and design at the News Literacy Project, warns they are affecting how some Latinos view Harris. Other false rumors appear to be aimed at keeping Latinos from the ballot box. One post, with Spanish text, deceptively claims that elections have been canceled and signals concerns about a civil war. More than 20 percent of the election integrity material in the News Literacy Project's database makes false claims about noncitizens' voting in elections. Researchers said those claims could be used to prevent Latinos from voting regardless of their citizenship status. A problem that is hard to study and quantifyThe spread of disinformation has spurred some new, if piecemeal, initiatives to study and counter the problem. Voto Latino is training members of its student chapters to spot inaccurate online content. The Harris campaign in August started its own WhatsApp channel. In a novel project, We Are Más, the Information Futures Lab and the Spanish-language fact-checking site Factchequeado, recruited Latino community workers and leaders over six weeks in late 2023, to answer surveys about what rumors they were hearing and to receive guidance on how to correct false information. These Latino "navigators" included a hair stylist, a construction worker and a social justice activist. Among the most common false Spanish-language rumors they heard was that the Nov. 5 election wasn't happening. Social media platforms also say they've increased their efforts. TikTok has partnered with Factchequeado to flag election misinformation, and it regularly publishes reports. Meta, which owns WhatsApp and Facebook, has more than doubled, to seven, the number of its U.S. fact-checking partners that cover content in Spanish. But, overall, there are still fewer resources to combat disinformation in Spanish than in English. Disinformation experts are also coming up against transparency challenges. A lot of disinformation moves through closed and encrypted social messaging applications, and social media companies do not tend to share what is spreading with researchers, said Stefanie Friedhoff, a director of the Information Futures Lab at Brown University's School of Public Health. And while the narratives challenging democracy and applauding authoritarians are global — one research project found commonalities among misinformation in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela and other countries — they often gain traction in the United States through channels that champion patriotism. Right-wing leaders in the United States and abroad amplify the falsehoods and misinformation, which are then picked up by conservative mainstream news outlets and Spanish-language radio stations, said Eduardo A. Gamarra, a professor of political science at Florida International University. He and other researchers said former President Donald Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, are among the most prominent of those leaders. On his social media site, just before the Democratic National Convention, it was Trump himself who posted a fake image of Harris speaking in an arena with a communist hammer-and-sickle flag. "It gets reproduced, it gets reproduced and it gets reproduced," Mr. Gamarra said.
Harris campaign leans on apps where door knocking falls shortTechnology like doorbell cameras makes it easier to avoid unsolicited visitors, so the Harris campaign is turning to data-capturing apps to supplement traditional canvassing. My colleague Katie Rogers took a closer look at the operation in Wisconsin. Clutching a fistful of Harris campaign pamphlets, George Pumphrey Jr. hunched in front of a doorbell camera in a neighborhood in North Milwaukee and began yelling into the little digital peephole. "I'm a volunteer!" he called out, asking to talk to the human being inside the home, who was visible from the window but was busy watching television. A woman's tinny voice came through the peephole, asking Mr. Pumphrey, 75, to leave a few pamphlets at the door. A few miles from Mr. Pumphrey's turf in Sherman Park, a 23-year-old Harris campaign organizer named Star Walker helped a volunteer load an app called Reach into his phone. It's not always easy to reach voters the old-fashioned way — by knocking on doors — so Vice President Kamala Harris's presidential campaign is dispatching fleets of volunteers and relying on apps to supplement the traditional work of door-to-door canvassing. That data-heavy approach across the battlegrounds is outpacing the Trump campaign's ground game, which relies more heavily on traditional canvassing to reach people. In Wisconsin, which Trump carried in 2016 but Biden won in 2020 by 20,600 votes — a total bolstered by Milwaukee County — Trump campaign officials are betting that door knocking and a large mailing campaign can help reach people across the state's 71 counties. Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you're enjoying what you're reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We'd love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.
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