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Hispanic communities in the United States export misinformation across Latin America
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In this edition you will find: |
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The inception story of Factchequeado, a new initiative between Maldita.es and Chequeado to raise awareness of false narratives in Latin communities to the American public. |
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Hits from the news: Misinformation on TikTok, our psychological reactions to misinformation, and a disinformation drive against a school in Helsinki. |
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Selected fact checks from our signatories. |
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Factchequeado is putting false narratives from US Latin communities on the mainstream map
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The content and conduits of misinformation vary greatly depending on their language of dissemination. In Hispanic communities in the United States, false information tends to propagate mostly on WhatsApp because that’s where Spanish-speaking audiences consume their information, says Clara Jiménez-Cruz, CEO of Maldita.es and co-organizer of Factchequeado, a new initiative aiming to tackle Spanish-language misinformation in the U.S.
Cruz first took notice of this in 2019, when she noticed an influx of misinformation in Spain spreading through WhatsApp that originated from the Latin community in the United States. That’s when she reached out to Laura Zommer, the Argentinian editor-in-chief of Chequeado, the first major fact-checking organization in South America. But a particularly busy presidential election, and a subsequent global pandemic, put off their partnership until recently.
“We imagine that the project can give the general idea to researchers, and Big Tech and public policy creators, that disinformation is not necessarily the same in different languages,” Cruz said.
Chequeado has also studied the flow of Spanish-language misinformation from the United States to Latin America. In an investigation about how false content in the United States reaches Latin America, Chequeado details the export of U.S. COVID-19 misinformation that subsequently impacted countries like Mexico, Spain and the Dominican Republic.
“Our goal is to partner in a way with the legacy and well-known English fact-checkers … to bring more awareness to issues that local media might be covering,” Zommer said.
They’re also putting together a small newsroom, headed by Natalia Guerrero, a journalist and Nieman fellow. For Factchequeado, it is fundamental to create verified content in Spanish, targeted at underserved communities to limit the impact of mis- and disinformation, and it aims to do that through a network of small and big collaborators alike.
“We're establishing alliances and a model of collaborative journalists, through hyper-local media to legacy media to distribute our verified content,” Guerrero told Factually. “Because there is content that only goes viral in the small communities that you never hear of. We want to be able to know what is around there, and we can do it through these collaborations.”
Factchequeado will be launching tomorrow in Austin, Texas at the 2022 International Symposium of Online Journalism.
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If someone shares your politics, you're less likely to block them when they post misinformation. Here’s an interesting write-up on a Journal of Communication study with about 1,000 participants, which suggests that social media users are more likely to block contacts for sharing misinformation if the contact’s political ideology differs from their own. Left-leaning participants were more likely to cut contact, the study found, while right-leaning participants were more likely to tolerate the false information. (Nieman Lab, Shraddha Chakradhar) |
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It's no shock that TikTok serves users Ukraine misinformation An interesting discussion of Ukraine misinformation and the enigmatic TikTok algorithm. One study mentioned found that new users on Tik Tok were shown misinformation about Ukraine within 40 minutes of signing up, regardless of whether they did anything to trigger the algorithm. (New Statesman, Sarah Manavis) |
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Next week is International Fact-Checking Week! Since International Fact-Checking Day falls on a Saturday this year, we’ve scheduled webinars throughout the week of April 4, on subjects ranging from our grant initiatives, the collaborative fact-checking project #UkraineFacts, to community efforts to tackle the harassment of fact checkers. Guests include our verified signatories at Maldita.es, VoxUkraine, Verify Sy, Ghana Fact, Vera Files, Science Feedback, Jagran New Media, Vishvas, EFE Verifica, and Liputan6. Learn more at https://factcheckingday.com/ |
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| — Seth Smalley, Reporter, IFCN |
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