Last year, US lawmakers urged the CEOs of major tech companies, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, to do more to combat misinformation spreading in Spanish, warning that inaccurate information about key issues such as vaccines and the presidential election was spreading on their platforms.
“There is significant evidence that your Spanish-language moderation efforts are not keeping pace, with widespread accounts of viral content promoting people smuggling, vaccine fraud and election misinformation,” the lawmakers wrote in a July 2021 letter. Congress has a moral duty to ensure that all social media users have equal access to truthful and trustworthy content, regardless of the language they speak at home or use to communicate online.”
More than a year later, and with midterm elections fast approaching, advocates say these social media platforms are still lacking in policing such content — especially when it comes to non-English languages.
With Spanish-speaking voters making up a sizable portion of the American electorate — Latino voters made up the second-largest voting bloc in the 2020 presidential election — the failure to root out Spanish-language disinformation from social media platforms is both an aid and an incentive to the removal of the law of law, said Mariana Ruiz. Advocacy group firm Color of Change.
“This kind of inconsistent approach, where companies turn their backs on the threat, shows how little they value protecting or caring for Latinx users who rely on their platforms to gain crucial access to voting information,” said Ruiz Firmat.
Experts say misinformation narratives in Spanish often mirror those seen in English, falling into two main categories: politics, or health and vaccines.
The most pressing narrative being tracked by researchers is the so-called “big lie” — the baseless theory that Joe Biden did not legitimately win the 2020 election.
This claim has become widely believed on the right, with 70% of Republican voters supporting the “stolen election” theory, according to a recent Politifact study. And it’s continuing to spread on social media, in English and Spanish, already raising doubts about the legitimacy of the midterm vote and alarming experts.
“When this lie spreads, it undermines faith in democracy and makes people less likely to vote,” said Jessica J González, co-executive director of the civil rights group Free Press. “People are less likely to vote if they feel their vote doesn’t matter, that their vote doesn’t count, or that there is massive corruption and fraud in a system.”
An August report by Media Matters for America found that many Spanish-language videos pushing the big lie were still open on social media platforms despite policies banning them.
The report detailed the contents of the breach including unsubstantiated claims that voting machine errors in 2020 allowed one candidate to win a swing state, claims of fake ballots lending another candidate’s victory, and more claims that dead people voted in numbers large enough to change the results of the 2016 election. .
Media Matters identified three Spanish-language YouTube channels that have violated content policies multiple times but remain online, with a combined subscriber count of more than 880,000.
The Free Press and a coalition of other civil rights groups say they’ve been pushing big tech to take disinformation in English and other languages seriously for months, but have found that companies aren’t responding quickly or fully.
González says her anti-disinformation coalition Change the Terms has tried to engage with major tech companies, including Meta, TikTok and YouTube parent Google about Spanish disinformation on their platforms — but has seen no concrete action by enough.
Specifically, the group asked YouTube for more information on how well it is controlling Spanish election disinformation and claims it did not receive it, and asked Facebook to completely ban theories that the 2020 election was stolen from its platforms. . The platform does not have, according to the lawyers.
In fact, many of the theories posted in 2020 remain prevalent on major platforms, said Jacobo Licona, a director of disinformation research for Equis Labs, a polling firm focused on Latino voters.
“There are still Spanish-language posts active today from November 2020 promoting election lies without warning labels,” he said. “A lot of these stories are being recycled and a lot of the original stories continue.”
The continued spread of misinformation in Spanish is due, at least in part, to a lack of investment that experts say — including a failure to hire human moderators fluent in those languages or train artificial intelligence in the language.
In 2021, former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen confirmed in a congressional hearing that the platform invests significantly in the U.S., but that 87% of disinformation spending on Facebook are in English content when only 9% of users are English speakers.
“Facebook invests more in the users who make it the most money, even though the risk may not be evenly distributed based on the profitability,” Haugen told lawmakers.
An internal Facebook memo released by Haugen revealed that the company rated its ability to detect anti-vaccine rhetoric and misinformation as “essentially non-existent” in non-English comments. Facebook has since made improvements to its Spanish misinformation prediction models, Meta spokesman Aaron Simpson said, and they are now working toward an English-like level of precision for the content the company sends fact-checkers for review.
The tech companies say they have been working to address these discrepancies ahead of the midterms, with measures to combat misinformation – including in Spanish.
Facebook made improvements to its Spanish misinformation prediction models since Haugen’s revelations, Meta spokesman Aaron Simpson said, and Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is now working at a level of accuracy similar to English.
The company says it works with 90 independent fact-checking organizations around the world to review and evaluate viral misinformation in more than 60 languages on Facebook and Instagram. Of the 11 companies it works with in the U.S., six review content in Spanish, Simpson said.
“We have invested heavily in combating Spanish disinformation on our platforms and this reflects our strategy to tackle English disinformation,” Simpson said. “We remove Spanish-language voter intervention content and connect people with authoritative information in Spanish through our voting alerts and voting information center.”
Meta has also invested $5 million in media literacy initiatives ahead of the midterms, including fact-checking services on WhatsApp after the app was identified as a major source of misinformation in 2020.
According to spokeswoman Elena Hernandez, YouTube says it enforces its disinformation policies globally, “and we enforce them consistently regardless of language.”
YouTube also employs people to help its AI-led moderation system, with more than 20,000 people worldwide working to review and remove content that violates its policies, including Spanish-speaking employees, Hernandez said. . She declined to say how many employees are able to moderate non-English languages.
Twitter is working with organizations such as the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials and MiFamiliaVota to promote voter registration, a spokesperson said, in addition to disinformation efforts in English and Spanish. It is also working with the Spanish Language Disinformation Coalition to inform its policies on disinformation ahead of the midterms.
“Our goal is to preserve the space for robust debate while ensuring people have the context and control they need to make informed decisions about the content and accounts they see and engage with on Twitter,” said Twitter spokeswoman Lauren Alexander. .
Twitter declined to say how many human moderators it employs, or how many of them speak Spanish.
Meanwhile, TikTok has opened an election center in more than 45 languages to flag inaccurate content and connect users with authoritative information, said Ben Rathe, a TikTok spokesman.
“We take our responsibility to protect the integrity of our platform and elections with the utmost seriousness,” he said. He declined to say how many human moderators the company employs.
