Disinformation in Spanish is prolific on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube despite vows to act

Social media platforms' failure to eradicate the false information amounts to aiding and abetting disenfranchisement, advocates say

Last year, US lawmakers urged the CEOs of major tech companies including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to do more to combat disinformation spreading in Spanish, warning that inaccurate information on key issues such as vaccines and the presidential election was proliferating on their platforms.

There is significant evidence that your Spanish-language moderation efforts are not keeping pace, with widespread accounts of viral content promoting human smuggling, vaccine hoaxes, and election misinformation," the lawmakers wrote in a July 2021 letter. Congress has a moral duty to ensure that all social media users have the same access to truthful and trustworthy content regardless of the language they speak at home or use to communicate online."

This story was amended on 6 October 2022 to correct that Mariana Ruiz Firmat works with Kairos, not Color of Change.