WASHINGTON — As protests swept the globe over the police killing of George Floyd, and President Trump told hyped-up tales of radical leftists burning down buildings in American cities, immigrant rights advocate Adrian Reyna received a barrage of angry texts from his mother in Texas.
“You socialist, I hope you’re not out there,” his mother told Reyna, 29, who works for the advocacy organization United We Dream Action.
His parents, immigrants from the Mexican state of Jalisco, had never visited him in Seattle and rarely traveled outside Texas. But that June afternoon his mother also sent him a video of cars exploding on what she said were the streets near the city’s protest zone. After a quick Internet search, Reyna confirmed what he suspected: The video hadn’t been filmed in Seattle, or anywhere in the United States. It was from overseas.
“I have personally lost my parents to the disinformation pandemic,” said Reyna, who cut off communication with them after arguments over the Black Lives Matter movement, politics, and the presidential election. “This is all new. I had never had this problem with my parents until this June.”
As the coronavirus shut down nearly every aspect of regular life, forcing many people to spend more time in front of their screens, experts warned that the climate of fear and uncertainty was ripe for the insidious spread of online disinformation.
Some worried about widespread voter suppression efforts, as malignant actors — both foreign and domestic — were likely to circulate false posts to confuse and dissuade Black and Latino voters from heading to the polls. But few predicted just how fast and how far such content would travel among Spanish-speaking Latino voters — or how effective some of that disinformation would be at stoking racial, ethnic, and partisan divisions.
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