The following article is adapted from PBS News Student Reporting Labs' On Our Minds: Election 2024 podcast. It is published here with permission as part of a collaboration between Student Reporting Labs and Teen Vogue. Listen to the full segment in the new episode on fake news and the 2024 election here. The guest, Sam Larreal, was a Teen Vogue 2024 election correspondent before departing for a reporter position at NOTUS.
Poojasai: Misinformation is so prevalent in this election season. I’ve been thinking about how all of us are targeted with misinformation - obviously, it’s happened to me! - and wondering if some people are more targeted than others.
Nico Fischer: That’s a great question and perfect for our next guest! Joining us now is reporter Samuel Larreal. Sam is a fellow at the Albritton Journalism Institute, and also wrote a recent Teen Vogue article about Latino men and misinformation about politics. Welcome, Sam.
Sam Larreal: Hi.
Poojasai Kona: So, Sam, first, tell us about the origin of your article for Teen Vogue.
Sam Larreal: I have a lot of experience living in the Latino American community here in the States. I have seen a lot of misinformation, both targeting me and people around me. It's very common to see, to hear a lot of conspiracy theories and a lot of misinformation and disinformation in these kind of spaces, Spanish language spaces that are often underreported and under-supervised by other people. One of my sources forwarded me a study the Harmony Labs did in 2022, studying the Internet habits of young Latino men and of young Latinos in general. Young Latino men specifically, they tend not to look for, search, or engage with political content, political content on the Internet. They usually spend a lot of time in gaming spaces, in sporting spaces, and are not reached by conventionally political, political content or news media. They're usually very easily targeted by misinformation or disinformation because they can lack the context that can help out to discern between what's true or what's fiction.
Nico Fischer: In your article, which, by the way, we will link in the show credits. You write that political disengagement among young Latinos has rapidly grown in recent years. Tell us why that is.
Sam Larreal: Disengagement from the news and political news it's not a phenomenon unique to Latin Latino men. It’s important to understand that a lot of Americans across many demographics and across many places in the country are slowly but surely disengaging from the news media and politics in general. So if you look at the polls, there are many young Latinos and young Latino men are disproportionately likely to say they do not feel ready to participate in politics or at least they say they don't feel as informed as other demographics. At least in my reporting, we can say that a big portion of young Latino men are feeling perhaps underserved by traditional political media.
Poojasai Kona: So how does this increasing political disengagement among the young Latino men impact their vulnerability towards misinformation?
Sam Larreal: At least in my reporting specifically, what I saw were mostly very casual pieces of misinformation and conspiracy theories. So, you see them on the comment sections of videos and the comment sections of streams. You see the streams interacting with those very casually, almost as memes. And what happens is that these kinds of nuggets of misinformation can be shared one at once and again and again and again where people just like incorporate them and just share them as if as if it was like a fact of life, and it became like a part of the background of their of their understanding of the world.
Poojasai Kona: How can young Latino men be cautious and aware of this political misinformation if they're not fortunate to be in these spaces that have these authentic conversations about politics?
Sam Larreal: It's certainly hard to reach people who, in a sense, cannot be reached or do not want to be reached or perhaps their algorithm does not lead them to interact with politics in a natural way. United We Dream is a pro-immigrant advocacy group, and they are trying to reach these young Latino men in these spaces where they already are. They try to reach to reach out to these influencers and try to like try to engage these kinds of conversations, like try to encourage them to share their immigration experience, their immigrant lived experience, and perhaps try to bring other people from their communities, and try to humanize their perspective as immigrants. I do need to caveat that. Measuring or understanding the effectiveness of influencer campaigns is very hard. And people in these communities can receive the messages in very different ways.
Nico Fischer: Thank you so much.
Poojasai Kona: Thank you so much.
Sam Larreal: No, Thank you.
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