A new poll (https://api.ddia.org/uploads/DDIA_Poll_Report_June_25_2024_98425ffa6d.pdf) from the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA) of 3,000 Latinos across the US found that many were familiar with false political claims circulating online.
The online survey, conducted in March and April, found those who were politically engaged and consumed partisan content on social media were the most likely to have previously seen false claims.
Roberta Braga, the founder and executive director of DDIA, said poll respondents performed similarly to the general population when it came to differentiating between accurate content and misinformation.
“There’s nothing inherent to Latino communities that makes us less accurate in our ability to identify false content online,” Braga said.
DDIA has been monitoring rumors, misleading narratives, and viral falsehoods on social media and on public WhatsApp channels, and used that research to inform which claims to include in the poll.
“We know that Latino communities are engaging with a lot of the similar content that broader communities are engaging with,” Braga said. “A lot of content that comes from far right-wing spaces, for example, gets co-opted and translated and spread by Spanish accounts or Latino-led accounts online.”
For example, the poll asked about the claim “Democrats are failing to secure the US southern border in order to allow undocumented immigrants to vote for them in US elections.” Twenty-two percent of all poll respondents said they agreed with the claim, and of the portion of respondents who had seen the claim before, 41% agreed.
The poll also found high levels of uncertainty among respondents, which Braga said could be a healthy sign of skepticism for viral lies, but also could indicate a worrying trend of distrusting information even from reliable sources.
