Despite revamped community guidelines and increased efforts to combat election misinformation, Facebook remains rife with unlabeled Spanish-language election misinformation ahead of this year’s midterms -- demonstrating gaps in enforcement of its already permissible policies.
In a recent poll, the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) reported that 38% of Latinos “believe it is true, or mostly true, that there was cheating and election fraud in 2020,” despite the lack of evidence. Recent Media Matters reporting showed how despite its election misinformation policies, Spanish-language election misinformation is still widely accessible on YouTube, and the problem also extends to Facebook. With midterms approaching and concerns escalating about the effects that the "Big Lie" will have on Latino voter turnout in November, Meta’s fact-checking partners are calling for more platform accountability.
Meta’s efforts to curb misinformation are uneven on the Spanish side of Facebook
Today, more than a year since a whistleblower said Facebook “enabled misinformation” by prematurely eliminating safeguards after the 2020 election, Spanish-language election misinformation remains unflagged on Facebook, highlighting both issues in its enforcement of existing policies as well as its policies’ shortfalls, which allow misleading narratives and outright misinformation to remain on the platform.
Facebook’s community standards regarding election misinformation are very narrow in what they say will be removed from the platform, stating, “We remove misinformation that is likely to directly contribute to a risk of interference with people’s ability to participate in those processes.” This specifically involves misinformation about “dates, locations, times, and methods” of elections and other information regarding the voting process. In addition, it has policies against coordinating harm that prohibit posts that may discourage voters from participating in an election, including statements that would call for people to intimidate voters at voting locations or that “voting participation may or will result in law enforcement consequences."
However, its midterm election-related policies do not prohibit election misinformation about wide-scale fraud or claims that the election was stolen, instead focusing on adding warning labels to posts that are debunked by its fact-checking partners and reducing those posts’ distribution. Facebook touts its high-tech misinformation identification removal processes, writing that its “AI tools both flag likely problems for review and automatically find new instances of previously identified misinformation.” But these efforts have been uneven at best on the Spanish side of Facebook, as the platform has failed to flag election misinformation included in this research that resembles other fact-checked content on the platform.
The examples below demonstrate those inconsistent efforts and include unflagged examples of translated or subtitled promos for the election conspiracy movie 2000 Mules, conspiracy theories about voting machines, and translations of former President Donald Trump’s press releases, tweets, and Truth Social posts that falsely claim there was fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
Despite looming defamation lawsuits against Fox News, the Trump campaign, and lawyer Sidney Powell, Facebook has failed to label dozens of misinformative Spanish-language posts echoing false claims that Dominion and Smartmatic technologies were used to commit fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
Examples in this section also include clips from popular Spanish-language conservative radio shows that have been shared on Facebook.
2000 Mules is an election-denial movie produced by right-wing pundit and conspiracy theorist Dinesh D’Souza. The movie, which is based on false claims of fraud in the 2020 presidential election, was produced in partnership with True the Vote, a QAnon-affiliated nonprofit that pushed conspiracy theories of election fraud and is being sued for defamation after accusing an American election-logistics software company of plotting “a red Chinese communist op run against the United States.”
Earlier this year, an official Meta Spanish-language fact-checking partner, TelevisaUnivision – which also provides WhatsApp users with in-app, IFCN-certified, fact-checking services – debunked several of the movie's central claims, concluding, “2000 Mules does not show proof of the alleged electoral fraud.”
Below are examples of Spanish-language promos for 2000 Mules that remain unlabeled on Facebook.
Trump’s conspiracy theories and false rhetoric
Despite having banned Trump from the platform last year, Facebook has been unable to curb the spread of his conspiracy theories, including when his rhetoric has been translated into Spanish.
Ahead of President Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2020, Meta specifically banned the use of the “stop the steal” phrase for violating their Coordinating Harm policies.
The examples below show unflagged translations of Trump’s press releases, tweets, and Truth Social posts, which amplify similar false claims of election fraud that contributed to the violence at the Capitol during the January 6 riot.
