Opinion | What’s the best way to fight viral disinformation? Look to South Florida. (2024)

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.

A national survey conducted late last year showed that Hispanics around the country see open borders and immigration as the nation’s No. 1 security threat — over terrorism, access to guns, cyberattacks, war, China or Russia. Eduardo Gamarra, a political scientist at Florida International University who conducted that public polling, says rampant disinformation contributes to the perception in immigrant communities that the next wave of migrants poses dangers that their own wave did not. Meanwhile, online accounts tied to the Kremlin and Russian state media have been actively spreading lies about immigrants in the United States this year in an apparent attempt to undermine public support for aid to Ukraine.

Messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram, used to communicate within the United States but also with family and friends from countries of origin, have an outsize impact in shaping views in Latino communities, and it’s harder to track false information spreading on them than on more open social media platforms. Big Tech companies have also done far too little in recent election cycles to address disinformation in non-English languages posted by the likes of propagandists and political campaigns on their platforms, providing fodder by way of links used for conspiratorial private-messaging threads.

But what is happening today in Spanish-speaking communities also paints a picture of where the entire nation might find itself in the near future. Artificial intelligence is increasing the ease and slashing the cost of creating and circulating online rumors in multiple languages and formats — from outlandish memes to deepfake videos. Shuttering local newspapers leave information gaps in English-speaking communities around the country that fearmongers with political or profit agendas can readily seize. Traditional arbiters and communicators of truth — journalists, the courts, scientists — have been losing trust across vast swaths of the population, and in some corners never earned it in the first place.

Who shot and killed someone in a nightclub is not a matter of subjective opinion — nor is the deadliness of a new virus or the date that an election is being held. What will become of the public’s ability to know such truths? This is what most keeps me awake at night when contemplating the future. Are we on the cusp of an era of unprecedented witch trials and xenophobia — targeting people and groups who we feel pose a danger, instead of demanding that political and business leaders enact real reforms to keep us safe? How will we convict criminals, exonerate the innocent, prevent pandemics or hold elections in this new world?

I recently spoke with the leader of a community organization in South Florida called We Are Más who also dreads this future — 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. Pérez-Verdía and her collaborators gave the trusted messengers templates to answer the questions in both English and Spanish using WhatsApp and social media vernacular and formats, but also in person. The formula: Empathize with a concern instead of shaming people or telling them they are wrong. And acknowledge — rather than ignore — the kernels of truth that make false claims seem convincing.

The South Florida influencers, for instance, heard a rumor circulating that the government had put microchips in the coronavirus vaccine so it could track people. Pérez-Verdía and the co-directors of the Information Futures Lab, Stefanie Friedhoff and Claire Wardle, recommended that the influencers acknowledge to community members who raised the rumor that it was a scary thought and of understandable concern. The influencers also explained that YouTube videos showed magnets and coins sticking to people’s skin because of natural body oils. And they noted that private companies and government agencies can track people using credit card and cellphone data, while also explaining what was actually in the vaccine.

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.

When there’s a shooting or an outbreak in a neighborhood or town, people seek answers immediately — and clues for how to keep themselves and their families safe. They look to people and cultural contexts that they trust for this information, whether it’s a beauty salon or a WhatsApp group, and they construct stories, often in collaboration with others. Researchers from the University of Washington have found, for instance, that many online conspiracy groups have a participatory quality, engaging their audiences in creating a narrative — a characteristic lacking in most credible information sources.

That’s why it’s underwhelming to see technology companies today espousing “watermarking” — labeling digital images and text so that more people might distinguish what comes from verifiable sources and what has been concocted by AI — as the solution to the proliferation of online disinformation. Many of the same companies’ social media and search platforms have long eased the way for propagandists all over the world to spread lies and conspiracies, resisting calls to tame their gardens in the name of free speech. AI is an amplifier of that existing trend, not the cause of it. There’s not much hope, moreover, that good information can now drown out the surfeit of bad.

It would be a better idea if the tech companies that have profited from the spread of misinformation, as well as governments and philanthropies, invested in community-level efforts to combat conspiracies like the one in South Florida — or attempted otherwise to get to the root causes for why people find them so compelling.

Rumors will likely remain rampant online as long as there is something to gain from manipulating the masses; people who seek to impart the truth might never be able to keep up with their pace. But that is all the more reason not simply to play whack-a-mole with pieces of online disinformation if we hope to see the truth win even some of the time. Better that more focus is placed on people, for a start. The most urgent targets should be communities in swing states, where lies are fast spreading as interlopers try to influence this year’s election.