Organizations that track misinformation have observed an acceleration of racist lies in social and mainstream media targeting immigrants and Latino voters. Such misinformation includes the claims that noncitizen immigrants are illegally voting in droves and the lie, popularized in fringe groups but amplified by Donald Trump, that Haitian immigrants are eating pets. The misinformation targets undocumented as well as legal immigrants.
JESSICA GONZÁLEZ; for interviews, contact Timothy Carr at tkarr@freepress.net
González is the co-CEO of Free Press.
González told the Institute for Public Accuracy: “We have to call out the meta narratives and broader themes. Leading up to the 2020 election, we saw misinformation about voter fraud and voting machines not working. But the companies that sell voting machines have a cause of action for defamation; they were able to sue Fox News for falsely claiming, without evidence, that their machines were leading to voter fraud. Yet defamation law says that groups larger than 15 people do not have a cause of action for defamation. You are free to knowingly lie about a broad group like ‘immigrants.’
“It’s not an accident that these narratives are combining the Big Lie [the claim that the 2020 election was stolen] with the anti-immigrant lie. It’s very strategic. It didn’t work for public figures to claim that individuals or individual companies were engaged in voter fraud in 2020, because it was a lie, and then those individuals and companies sued, and Fox News had to pay out millions of dollars in the settlement. But what better narrative can they find than the one that noncitizen immigrants are voting, because there is no remedy or recourse [immigrants, as a group] can seek for such a wide-scale lie.
“There is no recourse for a group that is lied about––but there is harm. We know that in 2020, when Trump was running for office, thousands of Facebook ads in Texas called immigrants and Latinos and Mexicans an ‘invasion.’ Then we saw a shooter show up at Walmart. These claims lead to violence.
“There are also political and financial and power dynamics at stake here. There was a political rationale behind the misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines during the pandemic: to cause people to think a certain way about vaccines. But the misinformation wasn’t overtly racialized. The impacts of that lie were dangerous and threatened public health, but they were not discriminatory, xenophobic, racist rhetoric that makes a certain subset of people less safe… This, on the other hand, is brazenly and baldly racist.
“Social media actors are amplifying this content. Elon Musk is a bad actor, in that he amplifies xenophobic haters and posts this content [on Twitter/X] as well. But it’s also happening on more mainstream platforms that purport to be doing the right thing, because this is their business model. The most divisive content gets ad dollars. Meanwhile, we have political actors doubling down [on these narratives] to pander to the anti-immigrant base. But how did we get an anti-immigrant base in the first place?
“This is all about money and what sells: what gets clicks online and what sells ad dollars on traditional media. The job of the media is to report the facts. I would suggest that this is not a fair and accurate reporting of the state of immigration in our country. The story getting told is controlled by political and capitalist forces that have monetary and political interests in demonizing or dehumanizing immigrants and not allowing their full stories to be told.”
González highlighted the recent news that Errol Morris’s documentary on immigration and family separation under Trump is not going to be aired until after the election. Critics believe this is an intentional choice by MSNBC. “That’s a really interesting choice,” González critiqued, “from a media conglomerate that’s also taking in millions of dollars in campaign ads. As a society, we ought to be questioning why that documentary isn’t airing while we’re allowing for the amplification of a lie that noncitizen immigrants are voting in droves or that additional people are coming across the border, even though we know that immigration has slowed.”