What Keeps Latino Voting-Rights Activists Up at Night? Disinformation; The New York Times, October 17, 2024

Jazmine Ulloa , The New York Times; What Keeps Latino Voting-Rights Activists Up at Night? Disinformation

"Latino voting rights groups are hoping the increased scrutiny will shed more light on content that they say appears designed to manipulate Hispanic audiences. The Pew Research Center in March issued the latest of its studies showing that Latinos, who may prove to be a decisive voting group in November, are more likely to rely on social media outlets for news than Black or white people. That has made the electorate more likely than the general population to receive, consume and share misinformation. At the same time, Russian-owned media has emerged as a major purveyor of news across Mexico and Latin America, researchers said.

“We see the influencers, we see the content creators, but we don’t know who is funding them,” said Evelyn Pérez-Verdía, the founder of We Are Más, a communications firm based in South Florida that tracks disinformation. Now that the government has opened cases into Russia’s involvement in American media, she added, “the more we will know, the more we will see the trail.”"