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The Latino public is more likely to receive, consume and share fake news and misinformation online than the general population, new Nielsen report on the shows of American Latinos.
The data and news company reviewed a subset of the top 100 U.S. news sites across the political spectrum, including some Spanish-language sites where at least 20% of their reach came from a Latino audience over the past year. During this period, 28% of the content shown to Latinos contained content that was reported as mixed, biased, extremely biased, conspiracy, or pseudoscience.
“That’s a lot,” Stacie de Armas, senior vice president of miscellaneous ideas at Nielsen, told NBC News on Tuesday.
“This means that websites that have a higher composition of Latinos in their consumer audience had a greater presentation of content that fell within” the aforementioned categories, she said. “So basically if you’re white your chances of seeing this kind of content are lower than if you’re Hispanic.”
Hispanic youth aged 18 to 34 are more than twice as likely as the general population to use WhatsApp and Telegram, according to Nielsen. “Misinformation poses a threat to Hispanics, who are particularly vulnerable due to increased reliance on social media and messaging platforms,” read the report released Friday.
“When information is shared on these networks, ”said de Armas,“ it can be amplified in a way that cannot verify the facts, as it is in private messaging apps encrypted compared to traditional social media. . ”
“And our community suffered as a result. We see it in vaccine hesitation and disinformation,” she said.
Nielsen’s report found that Latinos are avid users of encrypted social messaging platforms, as well as others like Instagram and Discord “because of the trust and privacy they provide.”
WhatsApp is popular among Latin Americans who use it to communicate with loved ones in Latin America for free.
“We underestimated the importance of these encrypted messaging tools for the connection,” said de Armas. But this digital consumer behavior places Latin American communities in a particularly vulnerable position when it comes to accessing truthful information.
Latinos spend more time with almost all social media apps and messaging services, including Twitter, a platform 30% of Latinos between the ages of 18 and 34 use, according to Nielsen.
Nielsen worked with Adverif.ai, a data firm’s technology incubator company in Israel, to comb through the content to flag different types of fake news content.
While digital and social media platforms have made information more accessible to consumers, they have also amplified the viral nature of misleading headlines and unreviewed sources. The phenomenon has created a space for disinformation and fake news to spread widely online, especially in social media and group chat platforms commonly used in Latin American communities and other diasporas.
The more this type of content is presented to the Latino audience, the more likely it is to be consumed and shared online, as well as on encrypted platforms such as WhatsApp and Telegram, which are among the digital platforms Latinos spend the most. time, said de Armas.
This underscores the importance of rigorous fact-checking algorithms, as well as the value of trusted influencers in combating misinformation.
Nielsen and Adverif.ai are working on a digital tool they designed to tackle misinformation on social media. The @factcheck_this The tool automatically retrieves fact checks from over 100 organizations around the world that are part of the International Fact Check Network.
The tool is being tested on Twitter during a smooth rollout in France and the United States with content in French, Spanish and English, de Armas said.
“It’s really exciting because we have recognized that it is our collective responsibility to give consumers the opportunity not only to check out the content, but also to advance their media literacy,” she said.
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