Florida Woman... creates network of Spanish language social media influencers to combat mis- and disinformation

What’s the best way to fight viral disinformation? Look to South Florida.​

Latinos are using personal credibility to fight online rumors.

In the early hours of a Saturday morning in April, a man in a bar fight in the Miami suburb of Doral shot and killed a security guard who tried to intervene. Soon residents started sharing a rumor over WhatsApp and Telegram. The killer, conspiracists asserted, must have belonged to a criminal gang from Venezuela infiltrating the United States. Known as Tren de Aragua, the criminal organization has become a recurring boogeyman in anti-immigrant conspiracy theories circulating in Spanish-speaking diaspora communities over the past year.

By the time the Miami-Dade Police Department released the name of the actual shooter — who was not an immigrant from Venezuela or anywhere else and whom police also shot and killed — the lie had already penetrated community gossip circles. Lost in the early rumor mill was that an immigrant family was the victim of the crime: The 23-year-old fallen security guard was George Castellanos, an aspiring police officer and the father of an adorable little girl.

I recently spoke with the leader of a community organization in South Florida called We Are Más who also dreads this future [of misinformation amplified on social media in an environment that is fairly lax even for English-language content] — and spends her days fighting to prevent it. Evelyn Pérez-Verdía works to quell rumors in Spanish-speaking diaspora communities, using the same group chats where they already are and drawing on trusted community voices to influence them. As part of a collaboration with the Information Futures Lab at Brown University, Pérez-Verdía recently recruited 25 local messengers — including the head of a YWCA chapter and a Colombian American hairdresser — to swat rumors as they start flying in South Florida.

The local influencers began by listening for questions and narratives taking hold in the community. They ranged from how safe it was to get the shingles vaccine to whether President Biden had a body double, from how to get a mammogram if underinsured to whether the 2024 presidential election had been canceled — a notion now circulating among Latinos in swing states thanks to a social media post translated into Spanish featuring the Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

The impact of this kind of work on community awareness is still being documented, but it offers a useful counterpoint to the latest trend in investment to fight online rumors, which is far too focused on technological fixes for what is fundamentally a human problem. What resonates most are the stories that speak to people emotionally and that they feel engaged in — whether or not they are true. Bad information meets people where they are when they are afraid and in the dark.