This story was written by Teen Vogue's 2024 Student Correspondents, a team of college students and recent graduates covering the election cycle from key battleground states.
If you are reading this, odds are you care about politics and political news. If so, you are a bit different from an expanding group of Americans — millions across every demographic — who are increasingly tuning out the news. This shifting relationship between Americans and the media leaves a widening gap between the highly informed and the uninterested, which is increasingly shaping how people understand politics and the 2024 election. One group that highlights this breach is young Latino men.
Political disengagement among young Latinos, a group that's adopted social media as their preferred way to engage with news, has rapidly grown in recent years. Research suggests that young Latino men are less likely to see political content in their feeds and that much of their time online is spent in digital gaming and sports spaces.
This cohort, according to a Harmony Labs study commissioned by United We Dream Action (UWDA), a national immigrant rights advocacy group, mostly engages with gaming, sports, and personal finance content on the internet. "When it came to young Latinx men," says Juanita Monsalve, senior creative director of UWDA, “they're living in a more insular virtual world.” Survey participants, researchers say, don’t tend to search for or engage with human-facing content about migrant communities and other groups, leaving them communicationally siloed to their main topics of interest.
This "media vacuum," as leads of the study frame it, leaves young Hispanics disproportionately vulnerable to misinformation, inaccurate anti-immigrant propaganda, and debunked conspiracy theories. The problem has been consistently flagged in recent elections, as Spanish-speaking communities across the country have been targeted with misinformation attempting to sway their vote — a trend that, in a close election like the 2024 presidential race, might help tip the scales between candidates.
"I'm an immigrant from Venezuela and my best friend is also an immigrant," says Victor Guillén, communications and disinformation strategist for UWDA. "He's not a very political guy. He's actually kind of disengaged.… Something interesting happened in the last two years. He started repeating very concerning conspiracy theories,” Guillén says. “Claims that [President Joe] Biden is turning us into Venezuela and even some transphobic remarks about kids being forced to transition in public schools.” Most of these theories his friend would share, Guillén told Teen Vogue, came from Discord group chats and communities on Twitch.
While Latinos as a demographic are not more susceptible to misinformation than any other group, Eduardo Gamarra, professor of political science and founding director of the Latino Public Opinion Forum at Florida International University, says that young Latinos of all genders are less discerning than their older counterparts. “They're less able to discern between what's true and what's false. And they tend to be much more susceptible to fake news,” Gamarra told Teen Vogue.
Young Latinos, polling suggests, are less likely, compared to young people in other demographics, to say they are ready to participate in politics, with only half of them saying they are as well-informed about politics as most people. Latin youth are also less likely to successfully flag false headlines than other age groups in their communities, according to recent polling.
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For many people, news can become background noise on the periphery of their attention. When you ask people how much they care about news, Yanna Krupnikov, professor of political communication and media at the University of Michigan says, “[Most] will give some sort of a middling kind of answer.” Still, even for those who actively avoid political news, politically charged content can be found in spaces that are not explicitly focused on politics. "[I've seen] a really interesting correlation between this 'news finds me' approach and a kind of political outcome," Krupnikov says. "It's entirely plausible that you're getting political content, but you don't realize it's political content. So, you are listening to sports, you are listening to a podcast, you're seeing something on social media, and you don't realize that what you're actually getting is telling you something about politics," Krupnikov adds. "Not because somebody doesn't understand politics, but in part because you're not in this political context. [You're getting] this information, but you don't realize that the underlying component is moving toward a political point," she told Teen Vogue.
The erosion of trust in media and institutions, she says, creates an environment that allows antiestablishment media, no matter the quality of the information they provide, to persuade audiences they are more neutral or trustworthy than more traditional alternatives. Like young Americans in many demographic backgrounds, young Latinos get much of their news from social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram (owned by Google and Meta respectively), companies that have struggled to effectively flag rising disinformation and misinformation on their platforms. “You're listening to this nontraditional thing, you see something on social media, you might think to yourself, This is better information. It might be less biased information,” Krupnikov says.
And while Latinos and young Latino men are a large and diverse group, this informational throughline might help explain how, motivated in part by legitimate grievances like the high cost of housing or income inequality, a growing number of them support Donald Trump even as he promises to carry out the largest deportation campaign in American history and has characterized immigrants as "poisoning the blood of our country."
"We're talking about two full decades of a polarized political system, [first with the backlash to Obama’s administration and then to Trump's]. So if you're now 18 to 24, you know nothing but polarization," Gamarra says. Long-standing political division, he argues, also plays a role in how young people understand and might want to avoid politics.
"I've seen the change happen in my own family," says Oneido Luis, who grew up in Miami and currently works in community development in Philadelphia. For Luis, a Cuban American, who arrived in Miami in the 1990s at the age of three, the political environment in Miami is a perfect illustration of how the erosion of truth can affect communities. "You know, how every year, we hit a new high for heat?" Luis says "Well, it's the same thing, but with partisanship. Every year it's a new level of craziness." Luis argues that political polarization in his community deters young people from interacting with politics. "I think those young men have kind of seen that and they gravitate toward these more apolitical things," Luis told Teen Vogue.
Localized and highly personalized political campaigns, Krupnikov says, might be a way to reach out to an apathetic electorate, but only if these efforts can "acknowledge the inherent cynicism that somebody who is disengaged from politics or somebody who's staying away from politics might have.… I think the difficulty of engagement in a campaign setting is really how you tell people I care about what you care about. I'm going to help you out," Krupnikov says, "But, by the way, this is still a campaign and I still really want to win." For Krupnikov, reaching hesitant voters in such a divisive political environment is still "a really profound communication challenge."
For UWDA, growing political disengagement poses an issue for promoting positive narratives about immigrants. In 2023, the organization launched a campaign in partnership with streamers and influencers in the gaming world. It was an effort to "open up the space for them to have those conversations and put them into particular in conversations," Monsalve says. "We wanted to create events that cater to the communities that these influencers already have…and produce a positive understanding of the immigrant lived experience."
Danny Peña, a gaming streamer and one of the influencers who participated in last year’s UWDA campaign, says that these kinds of initiatives when done organically can bridge different communities and get people more comfortable with being politically involved. “I had a lot of Latinos watching, right? But I also had non-Latinos that were watching and they were asking questions, like, ‘How can we contribute?’ Peña told Teen Vogue. “Some people are afraid to have these conversations push that through their content because they don't want to divide the community,” Peña says. “I think we should have these difficult conversations with people, especially with the gamers.”
UWDA plans to expand this program in the lead-up to the election in an attempt to reach a larger audience and help shape the growing anti-immigrant discourse. "My friend, who I was mentioning before, if we can get to them," Guillén says, the "conversation that they will have with people like myself and the people that I know will be different."
And while experts like Krupnikov warn that the impact of influencer campaigns can be difficult to measure, Gamarra says if done in a smart, non-preachy way, storytelling might help audiences humanize others in their communities. “Right now, they have demonized immigrants; all immigrants are bad. So the logic should be we need to humanize immigrants,” Gamarra says. "Immigrants have the very same story that everybody else has."
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