- hace 3 horas
En este episodio de Política con Acento, conversamos con el senador republicano Rick Scott, exgobernador de Florida, sobre las operaciones estadounidenses en el Caribe dirigidas contra embarcaciones venezolanas acusadas de narcotráfico y actividades paramilitares. La conversación también abordó la creciente tensión entre Washington y América Latina, el cierre del gobierno estadounidense y el futuro de Nicolás Maduro.
El senador Scott afirma que la postura del gobierno de Trump es clara: no a las drogas en Estados Unidos. Sostiene que Maduro es el líder de los cárteles de la droga y no el presidente legítimo de Venezuela, y cree que sus días en el poder están contados.
El senador Scott afirma que la postura del gobierno de Trump es clara: no a las drogas en Estados Unidos. Sostiene que Maduro es el líder de los cárteles de la droga y no el presidente legítimo de Venezuela, y cree que sus días en el poder están contados.
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00:00Welcome to Politics con Acento. This is our fifth episode of Fighting Misinformation.
00:05False claims such as increased illegal immigration brings increased crime,
00:09or immigrants take jobs away from people who were born in the United States, and even election fraud.
00:16Those are widely spread across social media and the Internet.
00:20The Latino community is a major target of these statements.
00:23Recall the pandemic. For months, false information circulated about medical developments
00:29and vaccines, once again, targeting our community.
00:33That is why we are breaking down the social media and artificial intelligence environment with an expert,
00:39Roberta Braga, founder and executive director of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas.
00:45She specializes in digital democracy, online misinformation, and the evolving role of technology,
00:52particularly AI, in civic engagement across the Americas.
00:56Roberta Braga discusses how we can detect misinformation and confront new challenges,
01:02such as AI attempting to manipulate medical, electoral, or social issues.
01:08The complexity of the current information environment is evolving rapidly.
01:14This is Politics con Acento.
01:16It feels like the last time I saw you was, like, maybe two years ago.
01:37It's just that time has flown by.
01:39It's flying, it's flying.
01:41But I'm so happy that you had a chance to come visit us and to make time for this interview,
01:47especially because we are living in an era where we are seeing that social media, AI,
01:52they are shaping the way people behave, people think, even the way people make decisions,
01:58especially the younger generations and the older generations, right?
02:03So you are very into what's going on in social media and the misinformation,
02:08especially the misinformation that is targeting the Latino community.
02:12So tell me a little bit about how do you see the environment right now?
02:16Yeah.
02:16So this is a really good question.
02:18We and our communities are not unique in this, are spending so much time on social media.
02:23When we talk to Latinos in focus groups and in the surveys that we do at DDIA,
02:28we hear them tell us that the first thing they do in the morning when they wake up is they check their phones,
02:32the weather app maybe, but then they're responding to friends and family and scrolling through Instagram and TikTok.
02:38And the biggest problem that we're seeing now isn't necessarily that our communities are believing everything they see online.
02:45It's actually the opposite.
02:47People are incredibly skeptical and uncertain about everything they see online.
02:51They distrust at a high level organizations, elites, institutions, and individual accounts on social media, too.
03:00And now with the onset of artificial intelligence and AI-generated content being a big part of what people see on their feeds,
03:07they have even more doubt if what they're seeing is organic or not.
03:11And we hear people tell us that they wish they had more tools and resources to make sense of it all.
03:16But by and large, they're trying to be critical, at least, even if they can't quite get there on being able to say 100% if the content that they're seeing is true or false.
03:27And when you tell me that Latinos don't trust and don't believe on basically anything that they are seeing in social media,
03:35why is that happening that way?
03:37And was it the same way always?
03:39So I think that as the volume of content has gone up over the years and more platforms have come out,
03:47people are being exposed to a lot of different things all at once.
03:52So there's like an oversaturation of content.
03:55And because we're spending so much time on social media,
03:58very quickly scrolling through in a kind of a passive way to pass the time,
04:02places like video platforms like Instagram and TikTok,
04:06I think we're just inundated with stuff.
04:08With the technology evolving, I think there are things that, you know,
04:13we trusted in that may be shifted over time.
04:16So we know that there's a lot of skepticism because we did two polls last year in 2024,
04:22where we asked people to tell us how familiar and believing they were in 15 false claims that we'd identified.
04:29So misinformation.
04:30And 66% of 3,000 Latinos we talked to in September and 62% in March before that were either rejecting all of the 15 claims or they weren't sure if they were true 100% or not.
04:45And so people, I think, have this like level of skepticism and there may be more comfortable than they used to be telling us that they're not sure.
04:55But that's both good and bad.
04:57I think that also means that we're skeptical of credible information and credible people.
05:01So one thing is that they are not believing in what they are seeing on social media.
05:06But then how is it that they are making decisions?
05:09Like how do they eventually end up like saying, OK, this is the way I'm going to, you know, process all this information?
05:17Honestly, that's a good question.
05:18I think it kind of depends on the person.
05:20And it's something that I'd love to talk to folks more about.
05:23I think for some people who maybe are trying to stay a bit away from news or a bit away from politics or negative content, which we hear is increasingly the case,
05:34they might be making decisions based on the priorities they have for themselves and their families on a day to day basis.
05:41So how can they, for example, make their lives better, make themselves better?
05:46We hear Latinos tell us that they just want to be able to make money for themselves, make money for their families, keep their communities safe, keep themselves safe, learn something new that helps them become better people.
06:00And I think that sometimes they're channeling that into how they're making decisions, including about elections.
06:05And we saw that this week.
06:07But other times I think it's also perception.
06:10So one of the biggest challenges of social media is that it creates perception gaps.
06:15And I think that means like the volume of a problem or like how big a problem actually is or how divided we actually are seems much higher, much bigger than it actually is.
06:27And I think sometimes that does also influence how people make decisions.
06:30They make it based on fear or something like that.
06:32And, I mean, we just went through an electoral process this week, Tuesday, November 4th.
06:37And I think it's already very ambitious to think that the Latino community, everybody will be involved in politics because, let's be real, like if you are not working in politics and you don't like them, you just simply don't want to hear about that.
06:53But at the end of the day, making decisions, going out and vote is what is going to shape, you know, like the future for our communities and families.
07:02So what can you tell me about this past election?
07:06What do you see?
07:08What people were telling you?
07:09So we are still going through data.
07:11Our partners, I would especially recommend people keep an eye out on ECI's research because they do Latino focused research.
07:17But we have some initial data to work with, including exit polls, which frankly are a little bit unreliable.
07:23But what we saw was that Latinos shifted a bit back to Dems in 2024, we saw that some Latinos moved in the direction of Trump.
07:36I think that was talked a lot about the majority still voted for Harris, to be frank.
07:41But we did see that shift to the right.
07:43And I think this week's election showed that some of those Latinos that voted for Trump were willing to come back and vote for Dems.
07:50I think that this was an affordability election.
07:54So it was also the first time that people were kind of weighing in on the Trump administration's progress so far.
08:02And we know that for a lot of Latinos in the United States, the number one priority and what they wanted to see the Trump administration acting on was the economy, cost of living, groceries, inflation.
08:14And many didn't see him acting on that.
08:18But it's one of his, at least for now, biggest broken promises.
08:23And so I think we saw that sort of come out in how people voted, at least in the major elections, New York, New Jersey and Virginia.
08:31And around that election, there was a lot of misinformation.
08:35And I think we've talked about that a couple of times before.
08:39But WhatsApp is one of the main sources of misinformation.
08:43And I think Latinos are still used a lot of WhatsApp, even if they are living in the U.S.
08:47I mean, I'm still getting used to text, but I still use most of the time WhatsApp.
08:52Exactly.
08:53So, yes, I think especially Spanish-dominant Latinos in the United States are very much on WhatsApp.
08:59As I mentioned, we're monitoring 3,300 groups.
09:02So anytime an admin of a public WhatsApp group shares a link online, we're able to kind of take a look at what's being discussed.
09:11And I do think that we see a lot of political misinformation around election time.
09:16Now, these public groups are a little different than, like, the groups where you might be talking to your family or friends,
09:21because in that they have a lot of people in them, like hundreds, and they're usually used for more basic, like, buying and selling of homes, cars, helping each other out if you move to a new city.
09:32But around elections, we do see a lot of misinformation.
09:34We saw a lot around Mamdani, and we saw, you know, some accounts, including on Telegram, that had, you know, pro-Israel names, for example,
09:47sort of spreading some Islamophobic content about him, xenophobic content, painting him as being some sort of extreme ideologue.
09:57There were even claims, you know, that he might arrest Netanyahu if he wins as the mayor of New York City.
10:05So I think there are always, like, a little bit of that.
10:07And that stuff we also saw on broader social media, too, in English and in Spanish.
10:12So it's something that I think we have to navigate around election time.
10:15The other thing I would say is there's always, always, just under the surface, these metanarratives, as we call them.
10:23They are stories that are false or misleading, that don't really change.
10:28They get recycled.
10:29And the election fraud story, that elections are fraudulent and can't be trusted, is one that always comes back in every election in every country.
10:37And we did also see that in the New York case, where an instance of fusion voting, which is something people don't always understand well,
10:46which is when a candidate's name appears multiple times on the ballot if they're supported by different parties, which was the case for Mandani,
10:54that was twisted by really high-level figures to say that there was widespread voter fraud or election fraud happening.
11:02So I think it's something that actually we could predict and ideally get ahead of.
11:07But those little instances, things like delays at polling prices, things that don't really impact the outcome of an election at the end of the day,
11:14always kind of get misused to say that there's fraud and so feared in the election.
11:20So now election fraud has become like a concept that is coming back regularly to social media.
11:28But what can you tell people in terms of like what can they do to filter that information,
11:34especially because that phrase, election fraud, sometimes is coming directly from the president.
11:41Yes.
11:41So if they cannot trust the president, who can trust?
11:45That's a really good question and a complicated one.
11:48What I like to suggest to folks is sometimes it helps to pay attention to the manipulation tactics, not the content itself.
11:57You should definitely pay attention to the content, don't get me wrong.
12:01But if you start to take a step back and you don't focus so much on individual pieces of content and you focus on manipulation,
12:07you start to see how that also gets recycled and you start to be able to identify it in post.
12:12So, for example, emotional language is a really common manipulation tactic.
12:18People who are trying to get you to think a certain way about elections might insert anger.
12:23They might insert fear.
12:25They might insert some really sensationalistic headlines or images out of context to get you to think a certain way.
12:32Pay attention to the emotional piece.
12:35Another is false dichotomies.
12:38So that means essentially when somebody posts something where they reduce your solutions to two things.
12:44They make it seem like it's either this option or this other option when there are like maybe eight other options.
12:51Black or white.
12:51Yes.
12:52Or ad hominem attacks is what we call them.
12:55Like when people attack a person to distract you from what they're saying.
12:59It's really a common tactic as well.
13:01So if you can start kind of thinking about what the account or what the people posting might want you to think or act like,
13:11and you start to notice the manipulation in that, then you can think twice about whether the content is true or false, too.
13:18So that's just one way.
13:20There are many other ways, too.
13:21And I want the audience to dimension how effective is this in the population.
13:27Well, you have probably more numbers than me.
13:29But like how is it really impacting their decisions?
13:33Because at the end of the day, they probably are getting what they want.
13:36That's what they continue to in the same.
13:37So the thing about misinformation is it's hard because people don't vote usually based on like one thing only.
13:45And the way misinformation or disinformation works is like you get bombarded and maybe oversaturated with specific narratives over and over over the course of time.
13:57And you might start to be moved toward believing lies or believing more conspiratorial frames of events.
14:05But it's still hard to say that people are voting because of misinformation.
14:10I actually think that misinformation often already plays at something that you're experiencing or feeling and makes it worse.
14:19But that the majority of Latinos are likely voting based on actual priorities that they have for themselves, the things they feel in their day-to-day lives.
14:28It is just the case, as I mentioned earlier, that I think sometimes social media is good at kind of pitting us against other communities or creates like an environment where you can scapegoat all of a society's problems onto a specific group of people.
14:46That's certainly happening now with Latinos in the U.S. and migrants specifically.
14:51And it's something that people tell us is hard because immigration misinformation is what people, what Latinos are seeing the most this year, they've told us.
15:00They both want to engage with immigration content because it's important for them, but it's also the topic of misinformation that they're seeing the most.
15:09And it's really negative and very toxic.
15:11And so I think people are also kind of looking at how can they navigate that along with all the other issues that are incredibly important.
15:21So some people can say, OK, this is about the election, but that only happens every two, four years.
15:28But what about immigration?
15:29What about health?
15:30And again, I mean, these are not my words, the Department of Homeland Security, they are openly saying that they want people to understand that their goal with the operations and the rates are to expose people out of the country.
15:44And when we see those videos that they are posting about the way they are dragging some immigrants on the street to, you know, like arrest them and then eventually deport them, they are creating this sensation of fear in the community.
16:00Could you consider that as some misleading message on social media?
16:07That's a good question.
16:08So I think that the videos that we're seeing, they're very real experiences that people are facing.
16:15And I do think that one of the administration's sort of goals in what they're doing seems to be to create fear and to make it so that people don't feel like they could stay in this country.
16:28And we saw that, you know, the administration was encouraging people to self-deport or whatever.
16:32But I do think that communities at the local level, the ones that are actually feeling what's happening, are coming together and pushing back on some of this.
16:41So the fear only goes so far.
16:44I think at the end of the day, people want something to believe in.
16:48They want credible information.
16:49They want to support their communities and support each other.
16:52And in the cities where this is happening, including in Chicago, for example, we see instances of the community coming together to protest, to push back.
17:01So I think that's really encouraging.
17:03We're all just doing the best we can.
17:05But it is absolutely fear-mongering is a huge, huge thing.
17:10But luckily, I think that we're seeing through some of that, too.
17:15And I think we are now recognizing the manipulation when it happens.
17:20And another aspect, health.
17:22And especially the Latino community, I mean, I still remember my mom trying to make these magical cures for, you know, when I had any kind of illness.
17:32And that is one of the things that probably we care about the most because we care about our family.
17:38And when we see authorities that are now in power, very skeptical, for example, with vaccines, and the information that we are seeing outside is very confusing.
17:49What can you tell people about that specifically?
17:52Because that's actually been with our life.
17:54So we need to be very careful with what we believe.
17:57Yes.
17:57Oh, this is a tough one.
17:58And so we actually did some research on cancer misinformation earlier this year, where we mapped out what the conversation about cancer online in Spanish looks like.
18:08And we saw, you know, the false cures, the false causes to cancer.
18:14I think that similar to what I mentioned earlier, there are a few things we can do.
18:18One is rely on local resources that are close to you.
18:24I think that there are local health care workers, hospitals, doctors.
18:29Interestingly, in our research, we found that scientists are one of the only stakeholders that are trusted across partisan divides.
18:36And I think there's a reason for that.
18:38So relying on local journalists, local experts, local health experts.
18:43The second thing is there are some specific fact-checking organizations like our friends at FactChequeado,
18:49who do verify information about health that you can always rely on.
18:53And I also think the last thing, kind of going back to what I mentioned about the manipulation tactics earlier,
18:58is with health-related information in specific, often what we see are fake experts being used to advance a fake cure to something.
19:09And so just taking a pause when you do see someone dressed in a doctor's uniform, for example, on social media,
19:15take a pause, do a couple of searches.
19:20Don't rely only on Chat2PT for it.
19:23And try to get at least, like journalists do, two to three different sources to affirm what you're saying.
19:28Ideally, official sources.
19:31But nowadays even, go beyond the .gov, because we know that this administration has some questionable views on health.
19:41Look for science.
19:42Look for scientists that have affirmed what you're looking for.
19:46You know, and if not, you can rely on, I think a lot of news outlets have verification arms,
19:52like Telemundo has Te Verifica, Univision has El Detector.
19:56You can submit queries into WhatsApp in some of those places for people to verify content for you.
20:01So it's hard.
20:03I do get it, especially with health stuff.
20:05But if you're, you know, relying on what's there, and then two or three sources at least.
20:10Yeah.
20:10I was telling you about Chat2PT, because now Chat2PT is a best friend of everybody.
20:15And it's impossible not to talk to him or to her every morning and say, like, hey, tell me.
20:20You know, like, it's an assistant to everybody now.
20:22Yes.
20:23But that's dangerous, because we also need to be critical in order to use Chat2PT in a way that it can be actually functional
20:31and not falling in information that Chat2PT is probably not able to filter enough yet.
20:39So what are your recommendations for all those Chat2PT users?
20:43Yeah, so I will say, you know, based on interviews we've done with Latinos, we see that a lot of people this year are using Chat2PT as an assistant for summaries.
20:52So for active search, when they come across something, say on Instagram or TikTok, that piques their interest, they'll go to Chat2PT.
20:59Still, most people go to Google.
21:01So to be fair, mostly Google.
21:03But some people go to Chat2PT, and they rely on the summaries because it's easier.
21:07They don't want to have to pull multiple links and make sense of it all.
21:10Like, it's faster if the summary is there for them.
21:13But we know that Chat2PT does have a tendency to hallucinate.
21:18And even though it's gotten a little better over time, I think it's still important for us to make sure that what the summaries say is something we verify with other sources.
21:26Again, I've had instances, you know, of Chat2PT even hallucinating academic articles when you ask it to produce, you know, a resource document or something.
21:38So it's really worth not only relying on Chat2PT.
21:42And I think that Latinos kind of know that.
21:47They recognize when things are a little bit off.
21:51The Latinos we've talked to do.
21:53And some are doing a pretty good job with that.
21:57But I think the issue is the speed.
21:59So online, speed is king.
22:02And I think that we all are going through information over and over and over, maybe spending only a couple of seconds.
22:07So it's very vibes driven.
22:09But with search, we should definitely spend a little more time, at least go to like one or two other sites to make sure that what the summary says is actually accurate.
22:17Roberta, and my last question, you as a founder of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas, do you think that AI will become the next big challenge for misinformation for the Latino community?
22:32That's it.
22:32So yes and no.
22:34I think that traditionally misinformation has not needed AI to go viral.
22:39And I think that even with the onset of AI, a lot of what we see is kind of, it's more rudimentary.
22:46So there hasn't actually been like a ton, a ton of AI-generated misinformation to date.
22:51I think that's about to change, to be honest.
22:53And something that I was paying close attention to was the launch of OpenAI's Sora 2 network.
23:00It's AI video-generated social media.
23:03And you might have seen those videos because they were very sensationalistic.
23:07There were a lot of videos, for example, of like kids feeding meat to bears or animals doing weird things.
23:15I would say those videos aren't real.
23:19Most of us recognize that they're sensationalistic and therefore aren't real.
23:22But it's tough because the quality of the videos are changing.
23:27The things to pay attention to for now, watermarks.
23:31So Sora does have watermarks on its videos.
23:33But if you don't know what Sora is, which most of us didn't and don't or are not paying attention to that,
23:40even when you see the watermark, you're not going to know what that means.
23:43You're not going to know it's AI-generated.
23:45Second, society figures out things really quickly.
23:48And we figured out pretty quickly how to remove that watermark from those videos.
23:51But where I was going to see it.
23:52Or if you pay the premium version, maybe you can...
23:55Exactly.
23:55And those videos are circulating on multiple different platforms.
23:58They don't just stay in Sora 2.
24:00We know that.
24:01So I do think that's where we might start to see problems emerging next year.
24:08And it will get harder and harder to tell if the videos are real.
24:12Because I don't think they'll continuously be sensationalistic.
24:17Like it might be more plausible as time goes by.
24:19So honestly, I think like the social media companies have a huge role to play in this.
24:25Unfortunately, a lot of them have scaled back investments in trust and safety.
24:28I don't think that should be the case.
24:30Governments, I think, have a big role to play in this.
24:34There are not a lot of regulations of social media companies in the United States.
24:38And I think with AI and these AI-generated platforms, we do need some guardrails.
24:46And we need them soon to help folks like us kind of sift through the confusion of AI-generated content.
24:53So, well, is the reality challenging?
24:56Like, even though I consider myself still young, I'm like, OK, I don't know what is this.
25:00I don't know how to handle all this AI stuff.
25:02People are lost.
25:03It's not just you and me.
25:04Like, it's everybody.
25:06My mom just told me last night.
25:07She's like, I, she's incredibly well read, watches the news all the time, has all of the information.
25:13Still, like, we're all in the same boat trying to kind of make sense of the pollution.
25:17So, well, there is a challenge.
25:18But I think that's why you are here, because you need to keep tracking all those trends.
25:23So I really appreciate your time, Roberta.
25:25And thank you for coming.
25:27Thank you so much, Stephanie.
25:28Thank you for tuning in to Politics Con Acento.
25:33We are incredibly grateful to Roberta Braga, founder and executive director of the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americans,
25:40for sharing her invaluable expertise on one of the most critical issues for our time.
25:46In the next episode, we will have a conversation with Maria Teresa Kumar, founding president and CEO of Voto Latino.
25:58Thank you so much for joining us.
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