Latinos Who Rely on Spanish-Language Social Media Content More Likely to Believe False Political Narratives

There's a growing body of research examining how Americans’ online media consumption relates to their political behavior and preferences. However, much less is known about how Latinos, the largest minority group in the U.S., seek out news and information online, and how this affects their political beliefs.

Two new studies from researchers at NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP) and the University of California San Diego (UCSD) help fill this gap, finding that while Latino online political activity is largely similar to whites, variations based on language can play an important role in shaping beliefs. Latinos who rely on Spanish-language social media for news, for example, were 11-20 percentage points more likely to believe false political narratives than those who consume English-language content, according to the research, which was conducted leading up to and after the 2022 U.S. election.

“While there's been widespread concern about the prevalence of Spanish-language misinformation on social media, our study is the first to empirically demonstrate its impact on political knowledge among Latino communities in the United States,” said Jonathan Nagler, co-author of the papers and co-director of CSMaP. “We've established a crucial link between the consumption of Spanish-language social media and a less informed electorate. This research fills a critical gap in our understanding of how misinformation affects different linguistic communities and highlights the urgent need for more robust fact-checking and content moderation in Spanish-language social media spaces.”

The papers, one published today at PNAS Nexus and the other forthcoming at Political Research Quarterly (PRQ), are part of CSMaP’s Bilingual Election Monitor, a project launched around the 2022 midterm elections to empirically study Latino online media consumption — in both English and Spanish — and its impact on shaping political attitudes and beliefs. 

Examining this community is crucial given the growing demographic and political significance of Latinos, who comprise 19 percent of the total U.S. population and have a sizable presence in key swing states, such as Arizona and Nevada. The online media environment of Latinos is also distinct from white Americans, given that 30 percent of Latinos are bilingual and another 40 percent are Spanish-dominant.

“Studies have shown that Latinos are potentially vulnerable to misinformation, because they rely more heavily on social media and messaging platforms than white Americans,” said Marisa Abrajano, lead author of the papers and a professor of political science at UC San Diego. “Social media platforms also put far more effort into combating misinformation in English than in Spanish, which compounds the likelihood of being exposed to misinformation. As a result, we would expect Latinos who use Spanish-language social media to be more likely to believe in false political narratives, and this is exactly what we found.”

To conduct the PRQ research, the authors fielded a large online survey examining the social media political activity of 2,326 U.S.-based Latinos’ — including approximately equal numbers of those who are English-dominant, bilingual, and Spanish-dominant — as well as 769 non-Hispanic whites. The researchers augmented the survey with digital trace data from a subset of respondents who shared their Twitter handle, Facebook data, web browsing history, and YouTube watch history. The PNAS Nexus study on belief in false narratives was done with a smaller sub-sample of 1,116 Latinos. To the best of our knowledge, this research is the largest and most comprehensive survey of Latinos' online political activity and information seeking preferences to date.

Key findings from the two-part study include:

• Latino online political activity, such as sharing news and discussing politics, is on par with white Americans, with one notable exception: Latinos were much more likely to use WhatsApp than whites (57 percent to 15 percent). (Source: PRQ)

• Latinos were more likely than whites (53 percent to 32 percent) to turn to social media for information about Covid-19. (Source: PRQ)

• Latinos who use Spanish-language social media for news were 11-20 percentage points more likely to believe false political narratives than those who use English-language social media for news. The results were statistically significant across an array of false narratives pertaining to Covid-19, natural disaster relief, immigration policy, electoral fraud, and foreign aid, and held even when controlling for the primary language spoken at home. (Source: PNAS Nexus)

The other authors on the two papers include Marianna Garcia, a PhD student at UC San Diego; Aaron Pope, formerly of CSMaP and now at the University of Copenhagen; Robert Vidigal, formerly of CSMaP and now at Vanderbilt University; and CSMaP Co-Director Joshua A. Tucker.

The Bilingual Election Monitor project was supported by Craig Newmark Philanthropies, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and NYU’s Office of the Provost and Global Institute for Advanced Study.