Refuse To Despair: A Reporter’s Notebook. My Intercontinental Journey to Unravel Misinformation’s Grip on Latino Voters
I’m a millennial. That means I grew up with the internet, in that sweet spot where I witnessed firsthand the rise of social media, but can also remember the time before it. I’m not an expert on internet culture or tech in any way, but being an internet user for over two decades, and an admittedly very online person, I have a pretty good understanding of how it all works. To say it’s changed or grown since I was a kid is a massive understatement.
On today’s internet, content feels endless and ever present. News can spread faster than you can verify it. Misinformation is everywhere. As a journalist, this reality is harrowing. It’s a destructive legacy left by Donald Trump’s presidency and his relentless attacks on all media as “Fake News.”
Now, I know misinformation is not only a symptom of the right. As a former producer on In The Thick, many of our conversations called out the mainstream media’s often dehumanizing framing of issues like immigration and race, even under the Biden Administration. But Trump was not just simply critical of the mainstream media. He was adamant, trying to convince the U.S. public that all us journalists were liars and only he was to be trusted.
This mindset was then stoked further by billionaire Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, who renamed the platform X and gradually devolved it into a breeding ground for fake content you could profit off of. The impact today is hard to ignore.
It’s exactly why the team at Futuro Investigates, where I’ve been the lead producer for the last year, set out to analyze how misinformation was spreading online, and reaching Latino communities. I, along with my colleagues Arturo Ángel and Roxana Aguirre, spent months researching. We pored through reports and data on misinformation, studies about Latinos’ internet use, and spent hours and hours watching far-right influencers spread lies about the 2024 election in Spanish (my algorithm is still healing). The result was Futuro’s latest investigation: The Misinformation Web.
My dream scenario for this investigation was that we’d find one clear answer to why misinformation was spreading. We would prove that all these content creators were getting paid by some organization to spread misinformation in Spanish with the goal of influencing Latino voters. Now, it’s not that this isn’t happening. But the internet is so much more complex than that. Not everyone who was reposting or sharing false content was doing it knowingly. And so the money trail ended up looking more like a tangled…well, web. And everyday folks were getting caught in it.
How do we even begin making sense of the impact of misinformation on Latinos, one of the most impactful voting groups in the country? Well, one way to start was by watching the actual videos from Latino online influencers talking about the election, all in Spanish.
It didn’t take long to find a pattern. Anything being pushed by Trump and his circle of supporters in English would, without fail, end up on one of these influencers’ pages in Spanish soon after. It was like all of these conspiracies were being discussed in a vacuum, all just churning out the same lies––Kamala Harris is a Marxist, Joe Biden is hiding how ill he is, the FBI was trying to incite violence at the raid of Donald Trump’s estate––over and over again.
Except it wasn’t a vacuum. These lies were reaching real people, all across the world. And even more surprising was that the young men we’ve been tracking were across the world, too. Two of the YouTubers we’ve been watching, Juan Torres and John Acquaviva, were based in Iceland and England, respectively. So, in early September, Maria Hinojosa, the host of Latino USA and the co-executive producer of Futuro Investigates, and I found ourselves on an overnight flight to London to meet John Acquaviva in person, south of where he was based, and Juan Torres —from Iceland— remotely.
Never did I expect an investigation into misinformation about the election in the United States would take us to two Venezuelan content creators across the Atlantic. Suddenly, we went from wondering about how this whole issue was impacting voters and who, if anyone, was funding it, to wondering why two men outside of the U.S. were spending all their time trying to influence what’s happening in the U.S. online, in Spanish. Why were these guys so interested in the U.S. election, especially considering neither have ever lived in the United States as far as we were aware?
I prepped with Maria before both interviews. But as she navigated the conversation, it became clear that both John and Juan loved debating. They tried arguing with her about Donald Trump’s felony charges, immigration, the border…the list goes on and on.
When we left the luxury hotel where John was staying in downtown London, and where we met him for the interview, Maria turned to me and said “I didn’t expect them both to be so mean!” referring to John and the prior interview she’d had with Juan. I told her, I don’t think their behavior was mean, so much as defensive. That was the sense I got. They both talk really quickly, almost like they’re afraid that they’ll be interrupted at any time. It made me reflect on how they themselves see the media, and why they felt they needed to be on defense from the start.
I saw a lot of similarities between Juan and John, in how they relished commanding a conversation. Must be the hours they spend doing just that on YouTube. But where Juan came off a little greener to me, especially in how he repeated far-right claims with no regard for facts, John was more calculated. I actually found him complicated. For someone who talked about the importance of doing extensive research before every video, even so far as coming to the interview prepared to read Maria’s own quotes back to her, I just couldn’t understand why he was so adamantly supporting Trump, someone who lies so casually. I was baffled when John said Trump didn’t fulfill a “vast majority” of promises he made, yet his YouTube channel was full of praise for him.
The more we reported this story, the more my confusion grew. Our journey took us to Latino neighborhoods in south London, to South Florida, and even right next door in New Jersey. In all of these places, we were met with contradictions. Whether it was folks like John, who were critical of Trump and still supporting him, or folks who said they didn’t watch any news and then repeated pieces of misinformation in the next breath.
On a rainy day, I took my microphone and recorder and ventured out to Union City, New Jersey to talk to Latino voters there. Sidenote–– if there’s any silver lining to watching dozens and dozens of videos from Latino influencers spreading misinformation, it’s that I was slowly improving my Spanish. But most folks who stopped to hear my questions would quickly shake their heads and walk away after realizing it was about the election. I mean it could have been my mediocre Spanish, but I got the sense that it was more along the lines of election fatigue.
One woman we spoke to in Doral, Florida will always stay with me. Ximena told us she was afraid of Kamala Harris winning because she believed it would lead to socialism, and yet, she told us that she wasn’t informed about the election. To me, those two statements seemed contradictory. But Ximena was confident in her assessment of Harris. To me, it felt like the entire issue of misinformation in a nutshell. Claims can spread online, and as long as they play on people’s emotions, whether fear or joy, folks will believe them, even long after they’re disproven.
As we wrapped up our reporting, I was left with the ever-puzzling question about the money. I was sure there had to be financial interests in running widespread campaigns spreading lies about the election to one of the most influential groups of voters. But as a reporter, this complicated question only re-energized me to keep digging into this.
I was also worried for the people from the communities we visited. If they were already feeling over the election, what did that signal for democracy? And what did it say about the U.S. media, whose job it is to serve the public and to ensure they’re being equipped with accurate resources?
Social media is overwhelming, and misinformation, as we’ve learned, is borderless. In this investigation, we called it a “web,” and to me that is the most accurate description. Not only is misinformation intricate, tangled and ever-growing, but its goal is to trap people. Still, I feel a renewed sense of responsibility as a journalist. We have to be diligent about informing our own communities with complete accuracy, or else that gap will be filled by something–or someone–much more nefarious. And we can’t afford to resign to despair.