Facebook and Twitter appear to have overlooked the deluge of disinformation targeting Spanish-speaking Americans about the election since Tuesday
but not the war Kelly Sheridan / Dark Reading : Disinformation Now the Top Concern Following Hack-Free Election Day NBC News : ‘Not done’: Why social media's biggest election test is ahead Tweets: Thaddeus E. Grugq / @thegrugq : The 2020 election was awash in disinformation. It was practically uncontested. Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were heavily used to spread disinformation. It was domestic, aimed at Latinos, and *crucially* it was in Spanish. Ed Dead Redemption / @edzitron : [contorting body into unearthly shape to avoid assigning an iota of blame to the Democratic Party's terrible performance with Latinx voters] https://twitter.com/... Reagan Battalion / @reaganbattalion : Here we go. The media misinformation machine turning to explain that the only way Latinos voted Republican is because of misinformation. Hacks and frauds. https://twitter.com/... Hamza Shaban / @hshaban : NYT: The onslaught of propaganda targeting Spanish speakers in South Florida continued Wednesday, where immigrant communities who have fled authoritarian regimes are receptive to messaging critical of socialism, through Facebook, YouTube and the radio https://www.nytimes.com/... @recognizeprop : @jennymedina @AsteadWesley @PatriciaMazzei @nicoleperlroth A HUGE source of this targeting was WhatsApp. Barely traceable. Patricia Mazzei / @patriciamazzei : The reach of the disinformation is vast. In just 24 hours, Spanish-language disinformation was generating traffic that eclipsed even the interference campaign by the Kremlin-backed Russian Internet Research Agency four years ago. https://www.nytimes.com/... Jennifer Medina / @jennymedina : They breathed a sigh of relief as Election Day passed relatively unscathed... Yet 24 hours later, it appeared Facebook & Twitter might have overlooked the deluge of disinformation targeting Spanish-speaking Americans. via @PatriciaMazzei & @nicoleperlroth https://www.nytimes.com/... Thaddeus E. Grugq / @thegrugq : Beware of any claims about how “Latinos” were flooded by disinfo and went for Trump. Reality is far more nuanced and complex. - Cubans in Miami-Dade went hard right -> Trump - Lots of disinfo - Left wing Latino organisers in AR + NM worked hard - Maybe delivered AR + NM
Context & Ripple Effects
Four years after outsiders had to monitor and prod platforms during the 2018 midterms, the pattern has repeated in a harder-to-police language: Spanish-language election disinformation on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp generated traffic that eclipsed even the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency's earlier interference, with WhatsApp serving as a major and barely traceable vector.
The gap was not an anomaly but the leading edge of a structural blind spot. Two years later, researchers documented misinformation accounts targeting non-English-speaking users before the midterms with scant platform resistance, and RT en Español ranked among the most shared sources for Spanish-language news on Twitter — evidence that Spanish-language enforcement lags English-language enforcement across every cycle since.
First-order effects
- Spanish-speaking American voters — including concentrated communities like Miami's Cuban-American audience named in the coverage — were exposed to unmoderated false claims about the election while English-language content faced active enforcement.
Second-order effects
- The disparity pressures Facebook and Twitter into building Spanish-language moderation capacity they lack, or ceding that ground to outside monitors who have repeatedly been the ones catching these campaigns.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — domestic, in-language disinfo outpacing both foreign operations and platform response — the policy conversation shifts from foreign-interference frameworks toward domestic, diaspora-language enforcement, where WhatsApp-style closed networks resist auditing altogether.
The trend: Election disinformation is migrating from foreign English-language operations toward domestic, Spanish-language campaigns on closed messaging networks, consistently one enforcement generation ahead of the platforms.