Filling The Factchecking Gap

60 million Latinos in the U.S. consume news in Spanish – but efforts to fact-check articles, clips, and social media snippets focus almost exclusively on content in English. Two leaders in the fact-checking world have teamed up to fill the language gap — Ashoka Fellows Laura Zommer (Argentina, leader of Chequeado.com) and Clara Jimenez Cruz (Spain, co-founder and CEO of Maldita.es). Ahead of the presidential election in the U.S. next year, they have launched the initiative Factchequeado. In this article, Laura Zommer explains more about the what and why behind her work.

Konstanze Frischen: There are 60 million Spanish-language news consumers in the US. What should we know about their media diet?

Laura Zommer: The U.S. is an enormous country, and there’s no one Latino profile. There’s the Mexican living in Texas, the Puerto Rican in New York, someone who moved to the U.S. to pursue a Master’s degree, and someone that is working 10 hours a day and just wants to scroll on social media at night to relax. What many have in common though is their consumption of content circulating on WhatsApp, because the app allows them to communicate with friends and family outside the U.S. for free. YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok content are also popular news sources. We have to meet them where they are.

Frischen: In other words, you’re targeting not just the big publishers?

Zommer: Exactly. We work with more than 40 partners in 17 states, plus Puerto Rico, from a wide variety of Spanish-language or bilingual media. They alert the network to the issues that are most relevant in their own target groups. We work with big media like El Detector from Univisión or Politifact from the Poynter Institute or Factcheck.org from the University of Pennsylvania. But we also work with small media outlets led by a single reporter, like La Esquina from Kentucky.

Frischen: Trust in journalism in the U.S. is at an all-time low, and for Spanish-speakers it’s aggravated by the fact that they don’t feel mainstream media portrays them or their context adequately. How do you build trust?

Zommer: We listen to our audience and ask them what they are worried about, what’s important to them. Unlike a typical journalism outfit, we’re not the ones determining the important or “trendy” topics. For example, our Factchequeado chatbot allows people to ask us questions, send us links or pictures to find out if the content is fake or has been manipulated. This helps us learn about disinformation in real time, fill gaps of information and build a community that quickly spreads fact-checks.

Frischen: What are some differences between the disinformation landscapes in English and in Spanish?

Zommer: Disinformation is a global and hyperlocal problem at the same time. In general, not enough people care about disinformation that isn’t in English. Platforms don’t spend the same amount of money to track it and they often don’t employ people with the necessary language and cultural skills. AI tools, such as transcript generators, are not yet good enough beyond English. We also need to invest much more in non-English academic research to gather better evidence and develop new solutions. One of our aims with Factchequeado is to put non-English disinformation on the map.

Frischen: The organization you started in Argentina, Chequeado, has grown to a network of journalists, technologists, and students that fact-check information across 17 Latin American countries. What gave you the impetus to start this work over a decade ago?

Zommer: We started Chequeado in Argentina 12 years ago, before disinformation had become a major cause for concern. We were the first outfit in the Global South and saw that people needed better information for democratic decision-making. At the beginning, our focus was on fact-checking politicians, social leaders and media outlets who were the main sources of disinformation. But six years ago, we discovered that often when topics were trending on social media, no one knew where they had originated. And that’s when we realized that there was a change in how propaganda campaigns were done: they were becoming more decentralized, more intransparent. For example, well over a year before the last election in Brazil, we saw the rise of a disinformation campaign criticizing the country’s electoral system, predicting problems in certain towns or states.

Frischen: Similar to the U.S., where Trump’s camp called the U.S. Presidential election ‘rigged’.

Zommer: Yes, but Bolsonaro got these conversations started way earlier. As a media consumer, you don’t necessarily believe the narrative at the beginning, but after hearing something repeated hundreds or thousands of times, all you might need is one anomaly to start saying ‘someone warned me about this.’

Frischen: Are most of the disinformation campaigns about party politics and political power?

Zommer: No, it’s more complex than that. There are bad actors trying to gain political power, of course –but others are trying to make money, even though they might leverage the political discourse. Take anti-abortion disinformation campaigns, for example. After Roe v. Wade was overturned in the U.S., we found some religious groups making claims that were not evidence-based, but we also saw dangerous campaigns go viral on TikTok to sell herbal formulas that would supposedly induce an abortion. There’s a whole disinformation-for-hire industry out there that can switch from anti-vax to anti-Ukrainian disinformation from one day to the next. Whatever they can capitalize on, whatever they get paid for. Disinformation is not just a journalism issue, or an issue of technology and education, it’s also about emotions, and about profits.

Frischen: Any positive signs giving you hope?

Zommer: These days in Argentina – where we started Chequeado – when a politician or a businessman says something that sounds suspicious, ministers and other listeners will immediately ask, “Has this been checked? Chequeado, please verify.” So there’s a change in culture, in behavior. Another positive sign is that, while we should still be very critical of Big Tech and how they handle disinformation, they are finally being drawn into the discussion. Five years ago, they refused any kind of responsibility. In a short period of time, public awareness has grown.

Follow Factchequeado on Twitter. This conversation is part of a series about what works and what’s next for Tech & Humanity

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