The Misinformation Web

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Published on: October 25, 2024

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In recent months, influencers living outside the U.S. have been ramping up their spread of fake news about the U.S. elections. Futuro Investigates tracked them to understand who they are, how they profit, and how they influence Spanish-speaking voters.

Juan Torres is a 23-year-old Venezuelan citizen living in Iceland and the creator of two YouTube channels with a total of over 200,000 followers. Every morning, he logs onto X (formerly Twitter) to search for sources about the 2024 U.S. elections. These sources usually consist of pro-Trump content creators and conservative media in English. Torres translates this content into Spanish, even when it includes false claims. He then shares it online through three or four separate daily videos. Since the beginning of 2024, he has posted over 250 videos.

Months ago, Florida-based Factchequeado—a nonprofit, nonpartisan collaborative initiative that combats misinformation, particularly in Spanish, impacting Latino communities in the United States—identified Torres as one influencer spreading fake news aimed at Spanish-speaking voters.

“As we get [closer] to elections, there is more fake content in social media targeting Hispanic people,” Ana María Carrano, Factchequeado’s managing editor, said. “I see [in Torres’ posts] so many images that bring emotions like rage. There is an intention here. There is an intention to manipulate your feelings, your intention to vote.”

Though he’s based in Iceland, Torres once set the address of one of his YouTube channels, “Verdades sin Fronteras,” to a warehouse in Doral, a city in Miami with a large Venezuelan population. But the address doesn’t belong to him. It is, in fact, the headquarters for a shipping company specializing in deliveries to Venezuela. A company Torres used several years ago, as Futuro Investigates confirmed during a visit to the packaging company. According to the company’s owners, this is Torres’ only connection to the Doral warehouse. Futuro Investigates tried to ask Torres about this, but he did not respond to our inquiries.

Using the Doral address has allowed him to earn money from his video views in the U.S. In an interview with Futuro Investigates, he stated that he could not monetize his content from where he lives because “Facebook is not monetized in Iceland,” so he opted for a U.S. address.

Data collected over months by Futuro Investigates reveals that, unlike Torres, most of his viewers are based in the U.S., primarily in Florida, Texas, California, Puerto Rico, and New Jersey.

Torres is part of a web of content creators inside the U.S. and abroad who have been spreading fake news and disinformation in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential elections. Regardless of their actual location, their target and ultimate impact are very local.

A Money Machine

Futuro Investigates learned about Torres in May when Factchequeado found out that he was spreading a false story about an FBI operation at former President Donald Trump’s residence in Florida.

The lie originated in English. Julie Kelly, who identifies herself on X as a conspiracy theorist and insurrection denier, falsely claimed to have documents indicating that lethal force was intended to be used against Trump. Content creators and Republican politicians, including Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, quickly shared this misleading assertion.

Then, Torres picked it up, too. He translated Kelly’s post into Spanish and published a video promoting the same false claim.

Similarly to Torres, there’s also John Acquaviva, a 31-year-old Venezuelan living in England, with 347,000 subscribers on YouTube and over 170,000 followers on X.

During an interview with Futuro Investigates in London, Acquaviva said he aspires to lead a political movement in his native Venezuela and mentioned he had spent time in the U.S. but has no plans of moving here. He said he focuses his content on the U.S. because “at the moment, U.S. politics influences Venezuela more than Venezuelan politics.”

A former marketing and web development specialist, Acquaviva now calls himself a “political analyst” and, like Torres, makes a living from the content he creates. He was mentioned in November 2020 by Nieman Lab as someone spreading “misinformation or misleading narratives.” Media Matters and Rolling Stone also identified him as a content creator who was spreading fake news in the leadup to the 2020 midterms.

However, Acquaviva denies he is misinforming U.S. voters. Instead, he claims he is just sharing his opinions. “It’s so hard for people to be able to, for example, fact-check me and say that what I’m saying is wrong because I know what I’m talking about,” he told Futuro Investigates.

Carrano, from Factchequeado, added: “For someone to spread a lie, they don’t have to have anything. They just have to make fun of something. Facts are not sexy to talk about.”

He told us that a video he posted in 2013 about Venezuela’s opposition cost him a sponsorship with Adidas.

I’m fully aware that my words can lead to repercussions. That doesn’t mean that I’m going to be a coward and not say them,” Acquaviva said.

Nowadays, he claims, he doesn’t have any sponsorship deals. Instead, he mentioned that he currently makes money directly from Google, the owner of YouTube, and receives regular payments from the tech company based on the views of his videos. He says 33% of his current audience is in the U.S. and 28% in Mexico.

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False Claims about Candidates

In the U.S., Latinos who get their news in Spanish rely heavily on platforms like YouTube, WhatsApp, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter, according to an April 2024 investigation by researchers at New York University and the University of California.

A database compiled by Futuro Investigates reveals that for months, creators like Torres, Acquaviva and others have been ramping up the number of videos related to the 2024 elections that contain misinformation.

The most frequently repeated themes are the idea of a “migrant invasion” and the falsehood that immigrants are coming to the U.S. to commit crimes. Other common conspiracy theories include claims that undocumented immigrants are voting, President Joe Biden is secretly ill, and, more recently, that Kamala Harris is a communist, a “radical Marxist,” or a “left-wing radical.”

Just two weeks after Harris became the apparent —and then official— Democratic presidential nominee, Torres, from Iceland, released 16 videos spreading false claims about her. These included allegations that she wanted to dismantle the entire healthcare system in the U.S. and that she had committed fundraising fraud in her campaign.

In one video, Torres claims that Harris supports “Soviet-style” policies and that her agenda includes price freezes similar to those imposed by Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro.

Additionally, fake IDs featuring a young Kamala Harris as a member of the Communist Party have circulated on Facebook, WhatsApp and other platforms.

Fatchequeado’s Carrano explained that the narrative linking Democrats to communism exploits voters’ emotions. “Many Latinos are fleeing their countries to escape dictatorships. This creates fear, and people know their ability to make decisions will be compromised,” she said.

Acquaviva published misleading information about Biden’s health and alleged censorship efforts by the European Union and the White House regarding Elon Musk’s interview with Trump on Twitter.

As election day gets closer, he’s also increased the frequency of his posts about Harris. Recently, Acquaviva published eight new videos on his channel with titles such as “Kamala Lies” or “Kamala Sabotaged Interview.”

In Futuro Investigates’ sit-down with him, Acquaviva said Harris’ proposal to cut grocery prices was the “same kind of policy that Chávez implemented.”

“My position on Kamala Harris is that how can you trust someone who has changed basically every main policy opinion she’s had in the past four years? And she’s done it just at the start of her political campaign,” Acquaviva said.

In Spanish-language WhatsApp groups, this narrative of “communist Kamala” has also gained traction. An estimated 24,000 people have been exposed to it, especially following the presidential debate on September 10, according to an analysis by the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas and Palver, a tool that tracks Latino WhatsApp groups.

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Taking Action

Fatchequeado in Florida is working to boost media literacy among Latinos through Electopedia, a website that provides explainers to help users understand the U.S. electoral process. They also have an electoral chatbot that lets people ask questions and receive immediate answers.

No experts and content creators interviewed for this investigation felt confident enough to give us a clear answer about how the money engine operates, aside from the profits that creators receive directly from platforms like Google and Meta, which owns Facebook. However, a recent investigation released by the U.S. Congress exposes a direct Russian intervention in several countries’ electoral processes, including the U.S.

Currently, the second-largest television network with a presence in Latin America is Russia Today, followed by CNN en Español, Evelyn Perez-Verdia of the consulting firm We Are Más said.

“We’ve heard from some journalists in Latin America that a lot of the money comes from the Kremlin to Latin America through certain accounts. There are connections with Venezuela. And other places, and then it gets disseminated,” she explained.

And while deep pockets continue to fund disinformation campaigns, Big Tech is reducing the number of content moderators and rolling back some disinformation policies. Making matters worse for Latino communities, major social media companies’ efforts to combat misinformation continue to be much more limited in Spanish than in English.

A 2023 report on the European Union’s Digital Services Act revealed that 15,000 people were verifying content in English compared to only 500 in Spanish. In the U.S., tech companies are not required to disclose this information.

“Disinformation is a public health issue. It is the responsibility of the government, civic society, journalists, academics, to make this a priority,” Perez-Verdia said.

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