Spanish-speaking communities in the United States are uniquely vulnerable to the unmitigated spread of election misinformation. These communities face risks other communities do not: misinformation often exploits their unique socio-political experiences, and social media companies typically engage in poor moderation of Spanish-language election falsehoods.
For example, in the final stretch of the 2020 presidential race, Donald Trump’s campaign ran a Spanish-language ad on YouTube that was shown more than 100,000 times in Florida over just eight days. The ad falsely depicted the political party aligned with Nicolas Maduro, the authoritarian leader of Venezuela, as supporting Joe Biden. It appeared to be part of a larger effort by the Trump campaign in Florida, a state with a large Venezuelan community, to connect Biden to Latin-American authoritarians like Maduro and Fidel Castro.
The Maduro ad illustrates how Spanish-language misinformation often reflects cultural specificities and is targeted towards distinct communities. The best way to combat the complexity of this misinformation is through well-resourced and culturally informed efforts.
While Spanish misinformation can closely mimic counterfeit narratives that started in English — such as the false claim that Kamala Harris cannot be president due to her foreign-born parents — other kinds of misinformation narratives are aimed at specific groups in specific geographies and involve issues that are distinctly relevant to them. For instance, false narratives portraying Democratic candidates as communists, which have spread among Spanish-speaking audiences in the United States in 2024 and in prior elections, can especially resonate with voters who have fled populist dictatorships abroad.
Such flawed information lowers public confidence in the security and effectiveness of U.S. elections overall. Amongst the Latino community in the United States, messages sowing distrust in democratic processes and election authorities — such as false claims of widespread noncitizen voting and election fraud in Arizona and Nevada — tap into fears that are very personal for some Hispanic people. Even amongst Spanish speakers who do not share these fears, the differences between American election processes and politics and those of their country of origin leave an opening for misinformation to take root as new citizens seek to inform themselves about their civic rights.
Conspiracies have gained traction with a considerable portion of the community, with about 40 percent of Latin people polled in the United States saying they believed in the overarching narrative that the Democrats engage in election fraud, a 2024 poll conducted by Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas found. This could be why 34 percent of polled Latin individuals in America who encountered the “Big Lie” of a stolen 2020 election believed it, and 41 percent accepted the claim that “Democrats are encouraging undocumented immigrants to vote.”
Efforts to neutralize and prevent the spread of such narratives must overcome harmful assumptions about the Latin community. Too often, political actors treat this community as uniform, but it’s not — its origins come from dozens of countries with distinct political cultures and linguistic nuances. While these groups often share common concerns — such as immigration and the economy — misinformation can be most effective when it seeks to exploit those origins, as with 2020 rumors that Maduro’s political party had endorsed Biden.
Another challenge is poor moderation on encrypted messaging platforms such as WhatsApp. More than half of all Hispanic adults in America use the app for news, social connection, and other purposes. Bad actors have tested narratives on WhatsApp and invested in the ones that generate the most engagement. Limited content moderation on this and other encrypted messaging platforms allows misinformation to smolder in private conversations (like family group chats or community groups) for long periods before being fact-checked by outside groups.
The primary burden of responding to election–process related disinformation tends to fall on local election offices across the country. Unfortunately, many of these offices lack Spanish-fluent staff. One way for them to fill this gap and reach Latin communities is to partner or coordinate with local media. There are a number of Spanish-language media outlets, such as Arizona’s Radio Campesina, that engage in voter education to empower local communities. English-language media has started finding creative ways to reach Spanish-speaking communities, like New Hampshire Public Radio’s “Que Hay De Nuevo?” newscast, which partners with the fact-checking organization Factchequeado to identify and dispel falsehoods.
Social media platforms must also put more resources toward stemming the spread of misinformation amongst vulnerable communities. Social media platforms have consistently failed to hire sufficient staff with Spanish-language proficiency. Though Meta, owner of Facebook and Instagram, claims to have improved its Spanish moderation efforts and increased investment since 2021, it has been criticized for over-relying on nonprofit organizations to identify, flag, and analyze Spanish-language misinformation, diverting resources that were originally intended for advocacy and service delivery on behalf of the Latino community.
Meta and other companies, including encrypted platforms like WhatsApp, must hire additional Spanish speakers from different regions to engage in targeted content moderation, devote additional resources to training moderators on the nuances amongst Latino communities, and take steps to build and strengthen region-specific misinformation databases to identify repeat Spanish-language misinformation narratives quickly and more accurately. To counter misinformation while upholding user privacy, WhatsApp should use its official account to proactively share verified information and educational resources in Spanish and find ways to reach users within encryption constraints.
As Spanish speakers continue to grow as a voting bloc and their influence in democratic processes rises, it is essential for platforms to adopt culturally and linguistically tailored approaches to combat misinformation effectively.
