What’s the best way to fight viral disinformation? Look to South Florida.
Latinos are using personal credibility to fight online rumors.
In the early hours of a Saturday morning in April, a man in a bar fight in the Miami suburb of Doral shot and killed a security guard who tried to intervene. Soon residents started sharing a rumor over WhatsApp and Telegram. The killer, conspiracists asserted, must have belonged to a criminal gang from Venezuela infiltrating the United States. Known as Tren de Aragua, the criminal organization has become a recurring boogeyman in anti-immigrant conspiracy theories circulating in Spanish-speaking diaspora communities over the past year. Sign up for Democracy, Refreshed, a newsletter series on how to renovate the republic. By the time the Miami-Dade Police Department released the name of the actual shooter — who was not an immigrant from Venezuela or anywhere else and whom police also shot and killed — the lie had already penetrated community gossip circles. Lost in the early rumor mill was that an immigrant family was the victim of the crime: The 23-year-old fallen security guard was George Castellanos, an aspiring police officer and the father of an adorable little girl. A national survey conducted late last year showed that Hispanics around the country see open borders and immigration as the nation’s No. 1 security threat — over terrorism, access to guns, cyberattacks, war, China or Russia. Eduardo Gamarra, a political scientist at Florida International University who conducted that public polling, says rampant disinformation contributes to the perception in immigrant communities that the next wave of migrants poses dangers that their own wave did not. Meanwhile, online accounts tied to the Kremlin and Russian state media have been actively spreading lies about immigrants in the United States this year in an apparent attempt to undermine public support for aid to Ukraine. Messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram, used to communicate within the United States but also with family and friends from countries of origin, have an outsize impact in shaping views in Latino communities, and it’s harder to track false information spreading on them than on more open social media platforms. Big Tech companies have also done far too little in recent election cycles to address disinformation in non-English languages posted by the likes of propagandists and political campaigns on their platforms, providing fodder by way of links used for conspiratorial private-messaging threads. But what is happening today in Spanish-speaking communities also paints a picture of where the entire nation might find itself in the near future.
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