Fake news is everywhere – literally. The term, initially weaponized to combat news and information that politicians deemed unflattering, has become a worldwide problem as misinformation, disinformation and falsehoods spreads like wildfire across social media news feeds and messaging apps.
To add, Nielsen, a consumer intelligence corporation, released a study in September 2021 which revealed that the U.S. Latino population are more likely to frequent sites that spread false or inaccurate information.
“28% of news websites where Latinos make up 20% of the audience contained content flagged as mixed, biased, extremely biased, conspiracy, or pseudoscience,” Nielson stated in their report.
These numbers are high, especially when compared to outlets that have a smaller or negligible Latino audience. The flagged content on those sites accounted for 12% of the overall media quantity.
Although stretched truths and political campaigns have always used the media to their advantage, the current surge of misinformation has become dangerous, particularly among communities that rely heavily on their local Spanish language stations and messaging apps like WhatsApp.
Evelyn Peréz-Verdía is an activist who specializes in combating disinformation. She is the president of We Are Más, an organization dedicated to honoring local knowledge and cultures.
“It’s a big issue because it really shows a vacuum that we have in our Latinos and Hispanic communities, that you know, many Latinos work all day, morning to night, get home, make dinner, and work again. They don’t have time to verify if something is correct or not,” she said.
Misinformation regarding the pandemic has led to large fears of vaccination, distrust of masks, and has even impacted day-to-day life choices with things like unhealthy diets, dangerous pseudoscience, untrue statistics, and sometimes entirely made-up news.
Disinformation damages communities and can lead to many serious problems. In September of 2021, a local Miami host on Actualidad promoted the medication Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID-19. The medication’s use is to deworm cattle.
Last year, the host announced that he had read studies where doctors are using Ivermectin with extraordinary results, claiming that individuals who were exposed to the virus recovered in three or four days.
Advisories from the Center for Disease Control and as well the Food & Drug Administration have strongly discouraged this method of treatment.
These supposed studies were never presented; but, if a trusted news source conveys disinformation to its loyal listeners, then the audience are likely to believe it. It is a bond that all journalists hope to nurture with their audience, one based on trust. Once that bond is weaponized, the results can be dangerous.
Following the spread of the medicine as a treatment for the coronavirus, Florida Poison Control observed a statistical increase in calls due to the use of this medicine in people, sometimes leading to seizures and hospitalizations.
Latino populations fall prey to these targeted sites for many reasons that make them especially vulnerable. One of the major reasons would be the lack of news outlets that serve the community in their native language.
“Sometimes governments, sometimes organizations, sometimes businesses, forget to give information in Spanish… and don’t consider the Spanish-speaking community important, so a lot of this has to do with making sure that people realize their importance,” added Peréz-Verdía.
Providing information and establishing a relationship with communities is important. There is no other way to build trust.
“The United States is one of the top Spanish-speaking countries in the world, so you have to address that in the same way you address English, and that’s that simple…we just need to do better and give more information to our communities, that’s the final point.” she continued
In an era when it has become so much easier to connect with others, when facts and figures are only clicks away, the overload of available information has only worked to drive people apart. As people become increasingly polarized and algorithms reward the most outlandish claims, agreeing on objective facts has become a challenge.
And this has consequences for everyone.
“People are voting for the wrong people, for those that lied to them,” said Peréz-Verdía.
“Or they do not want to participate in voting, because they just don’t know who to believe, so they stay at home… But also, it creates deaths, we’ve gone over 60,000 deaths in Florida because of people, many of whom were told they shouldn’t get vaccinated… So really the consequences are that we’ve lost family members, we lost lives that could’ve been saved.”
