Nearing the two-year anniversary of the 2020 election that made Joe Biden the nation’s 46th president, Spanish-language videos falsely claiming otherwise are still up for countless people to watch on YouTube. Spanish-language misinformation has been a steady worry for both advocates and lawmakers, who pressed YouTube’s chief executive officer on the matter in a meeting this past April.
Media Matters for America said in a report this week that lie-riddled, Spanish-language videos falsely claiming Biden didn’t win remain a huge issue on the platform. By the platform’s own policies, they shouldn’t be there. “Many of the videos violate YouTube’s election misinformation policies,” Media Matters said (bold emphasis by the watchdog).
RELATED STORY: FTC commissioner urges use of 'statutory toolbox' to combat Spanish-language disinformation
Campaign Action
One such video is from the Spanish-language counterpart to the conspiracy theory outlet Epoch Times. Media Matters points to a January 2021 video falsely claiming that more than 430,000 votes were taken from the insurrectionist president’s tally in Pennsylvania. This did not happen. He lost that state fair and square. Media Matters further said that the outlet used a photo of Georgia campaign workers “to make the false claim that the workers [in Pennsylvania] snuck in fraudulent ballots in suitcases, giving President Joe Biden the lead in the state” (emphasis again by Media Matters).
“Some Spanish-language videos from our review were given a banner (without explicitly stating that the video is misinformative) with a link to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or The Bipartisan Policy Center website, while others were not given a banner at all—indicating that even minimal content moderation efforts have been inconsistent,” the watchdog said.
This has been an ongoing, frustrating issue. NBC News reported last November that while tech companies flagged or removed posts featuring English-language disinformation, the same hasn’t happened for Spanish-language versions of those posts. This has been particularly dangerous in attempting to combat the novel coronavirus pandemic, with some rumors that spread among Spanish-language social media even claiming that children who test positive for the virus would be taken from their parents. “More recently, we’ve seen that Facebook will flag vaccine misinformation content in English, but the same content in Spanish takes days to get flagged, if it ever does,” Equis Research and Equis Labs co-founder Stephanie Valencia told The Washington Post last year.
“If YouTube does not start to address this content in earnest, we could easily see another wave of Spanish election misinformation on the platform this midterm cycle,” Media Matters said.
In a hugely significant move earlier this year, a Latina-led media group announced a deal acquiring 18 radio stations in 10 cities, including one “ultraconservative” station in Miami that falsely labeled then-candidate Biden “a ‘socialista’ who would turn the U.S. into a left-wing dictatorship like Venezuela's,” WLRN reported. That report said the deal must still be approved by the Federal Communications Commission, a process that could go into next year. But if given the thumbs up, the stations could reach as many as one-third of the nation’s Latinos.
RELATED STORIES:
Lawmakers press messaging apps on efforts to combat disinformation campaigns targeted at Latinos
Voto Latino, Media Matters to kick off campaign targeting vaccine misinformation in Latino community
Latina-led media group acquires 18 radio stations, including 'ultraconservative' Miami outlet
