Angelo Carusone talks to Fusion TV about “intentional disinformation” posted on Spanish-language social media in run-up to the election
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From the November 13, 2020, edition of Fusion’s UNEWS
ANDREA LINARES (ANCHOR): So, talk to us about some of this disinformation spreading in Spanish social media?
ANGELO CARUSONE (PRESIDENT AND CEO, MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA): So, a lot of them started right before the election, and continued through. Two fo the biggest threads that we saw was that Nicolas Maduro had endorsed Joe Biden, and that Biden had secret plans to reinstate the Maduro regime and to support him if he was to be elected. And one of the things happened is that as soon as that false claim was proliferating — it started with a Spanish-language Twitter account, Equipo Trump, and then it was retweeted by a bunch of Republican operatives and members of the Trump campaign, and then it reverberated back around into Spanish-language media. So that's one example.
And the others that we've seen are sort of consistent with that, but then there's another thread of misinformation that actually is wildly inflating the support for Donald Trump and his claims. So a couple weeks ago, there was a report that there was a 30,000-car, anti-communism, pro-Trump caravan organized in Florida by Latinos For Trump. And that wasn't true at all. It was actually an anti-communist caravan — that's true, it did happen — it had a few dozen cars there, not 30,000. But the same thing happened with the attacks on the election, is that that 30,000 number started with some Spanish-language Twitter accounts, then was retweeted by Republican operatives, and made its way back to Spanish-language radio and a few other social media outlets, and then a lot of spreading directly through WhatsApp and some other direct peer-to-peer applications.
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LINARES: Now, you mentioned that some of these accounts were intentionally posting misinformation. That leads me to wonder, how influential were these social media accounts in the lead-up to the election, and in terms of garnering votes for President Trump?
CARUSONE: It's two questions. I think it's hard to end up on how successful they were in garnering support for Trump. It's easier to understand how successful they were at depressing or eroding support for Biden. Because the single biggest narrative that we saw being heavily distributed, especially in the days right before the election, was this idea that Biden was in cahoots with — with communists in Latin America. It just was everywhere. And there were so many individual, different smears and attacks that proliferated.
And that was an intention, it was a goal, which is not only to try to dissuade them by support — or erode support by suggesting that Biden doesn't care about communism in Latin America, and all the harms that can come from that. But actually, to go one step further, is that there was this constant refrain that, you know, somehow this election was going to be soiled from the very beginning, because Biden was executing a coup.
Of all these things, every single one of those smears and attacks, the same individuals pushing those accounts before the election, on Election Day started to promote the idea that Biden was executing a coup, very similar to — and then, insert country, insert leader — depending on the community that they were speaking with. So, that's where I think some of it was intentional disinformation, designed to really erode support within different parts of the Latinx community.