How Latinos became a key target for misinformation in the U.S. election

Is Taylor Swift a Pentagon psychological operations asset? Did Texas governor Greg Abbott say that Joe Biden needs to learn from Vladimir Putin to work for the interest of the United States? Did Donald Trump say that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job of the U.S. government? Has the U.S. military arrived in Ecuador to ‘kill terrorists’?

If you scroll through Spanish-language TikTok, X, and Facebook, you may have seen some of these falsehoods that aim to negatively portray Democrats or Republicans, depending on which fake news you encounter.

U.S. voters will head to the polls on November 5 in the first presidential election since the rise of generative AI. Audiences might be exposed to audio, images and videos created with Midjourney, DALL-E, ChatGPT and other tools. But they will definitely encounter more traditional forms of misinformation, which tend to be based on true information that’s spun, twisted, recontextualized, or reworked by activists and campaigners with the goal of reinforcing partisan narratives, just as the stories above show.

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