Challenging Election Lies Targeting Latinos and Immigrants
In communities across our nation, millions of immigrants are living quietly and in harmony with native-born residents. We’re neighbors, coworkers and friends, and we’re caring for each other across racial, ethnic and partisan lines.
Yet we rarely see those stories on the nightly news or on the front page; those stories never go viral on social-media platforms. That’s because these kinds of stories don’t help the politically powerful in our country, and they don’t enrich the profits of corporate media empires.
Instead we see stories that repeatedly exploit and demonize immigrants. We see the lie that noncitizen immigrants are voting in droves. We see fabricated stories about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets. And within Spanish-speaking communities, we see serious concerns about the consequences of this disinformation.
Confronting harmful narratives
On Sept. 26, Free Press and the Latino Media Collaborative (LMC) hosted a webinar to discuss the proliferation of racist lies on social and mainstream media. I moderated the conversation, and panelists included Roberta Braga of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas, Vanessa Cárdenas of America’s Voice, Arturo Carmona and Esperanza Guevara of LMC, Jennie Carreón of the Carreón Group and Anshantia Oso of Free Press’ Media 2070 project.
“These narratives, these stories that get told about the world, are sometimes massively twisted … ,” said Braga. “One approach to countering disinformation, from our perspective, is not getting bogged down in the specific claims, but rather tackling the meta-narratives.”
Meta-narratives are the broader patterns at work — for example, the false claim that immigrants of color are destroying our society.
Our dynamic conversation equipped hundreds of attendees with useful tactics to confront these ugly assertions before they do further damage to our communities. If you find yourself facing mis- and disinformation — and odds are you will — I’d encourage you to view the recording to learn how you can debunk lies and manipulation … and head them off at the pass:
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