Originally posted in CBS Morning

With the Latino vote increasingly pivotal in the 2024 election, concerns are rising around targeted disinformation campaigns aimed at this demographic. Roberta Braga, co-founder of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA), recently joined CBS Mornings to discuss how misleading narratives are influencing Latino voters.

In an interview with co-hosts Gayle King and Tony Dokoupil, Braga shared how DDIA is tackling this issue through a combination of polling and narrative analysis, closely monitoring social media platforms and over 1,300 public WhatsApp groups to track disinformation.

Braga noted that, this year, much of the misinformation targeting Latino communities is recycled content from past election cycles or foreign contexts, categorized into three main disinformation “buckets”: election fraud, anti-immigration rhetoric, and conspiracy theories that suggest efforts to suppress society. Despite these challenges, Braga highlighted some positive trends: belief in certain conspiracy narratives has decreased, signaling that people are becoming more critical and resilient in evaluating the information they consume. She also emphasized the need to assess social media business models that incentivize extremist content.

For more insights into how misinformation affects Latino communities, see DDIA’s full report, On Disinformation, Distrust, and Democracy: A DDIA Poll of U.S. Latinos Leading Up to the 2024 Elections.