Article Published: October 6, 2022
Written By: Kari Paul for The Guardian
Social media platforms’ failure to eradicate the false information amounts to aiding and abetting disenfranchisement, advocates say
Last year, US lawmakers urged the CEOs of major tech companies including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to do more to combat disinformation spreading in Spanish, warning that inaccurate information on key issues such as vaccines and the presidential election was proliferating on their platforms.
“There is significant evidence that your Spanish-language moderation efforts are not keeping pace, with widespread accounts of viral content promoting human smuggling, vaccine hoaxes, and election misinformation,” the lawmakers wrote in a July 2021 letter. “Congress has a moral duty to ensure that all social media users have the same access to truthful and trustworthy content regardless of the language they speak at home or use to communicate online.”
More than a year later, and with the midterm elections fast approaching, advocates say these social media platforms are still falling short on policing such content – particularly when it comes to non-English languages.
With Spanish-speaking voters making up a significant part of the US electorate – Latino voters constituted the second largest voting block in the 2020 presidential election – the failure to eradicate misinformation in Spanish from social media platforms amounts to aiding and abetting disenfranchisement, said Mariana Ruiz Firmat, executive director at tech-focused racial justice nonprofit organization Kairos.
“This kind of nonchalant approach, where companies turn their heads away from the threat, shows how little they value protecting or caring about Latinx users who rely on their platforms to gain crucial access to information about voting,” said Ruiz Firmat.
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