‘Misinformation isn’t a one-way street.’ Republicans say Democrats escape scrutiny

Republicans say concerns about Spanish-language disinformation having an impact on elections are one-sided and part of a Democratic propaganda campaign to help stem that party’s losses among Hispanic voters.

Last week, operatives with the Republican Party — which has widely embraced Donald Trump’s falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen from him — highlighted a new poll by Republican consulting firm WPA Intelligence that found that 45% of Democrats believe the 2016 election “was stolen” from Hillary Clinton by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The national poll that surveyed 1,000 participants from all political parties, conducted in late August, also found that more than half the party’s voters believe the U.S. Supreme Court struck down legal abortion when it overturned Roe v. Wade in June. Republicans point out that the ruling shifted the decision to individual states on whether to make abortion illegal.

“Misinformation isn’t a one-way street,” the firm stated on one slide promoting the results of the poll, which also asked about whether Florida banned the word “gay” from public schools or forced teachers to disclose their political beliefs.

Chris Wilson, CEO and founder of WPA Intelligence, told the Miami Herald that the firm conducted the poll because there has “been a great deal of coverage in the past year to misinformation and disinformation with nearly all of it focused on right-leaning sources and voters.”

“As researchers, we suspected this has painted an incomplete picture and we wanted to test our hypothesis and study the matter further,” Wilson said.

The emphasis of the poll and Republican reaction to it provides a window into how the GOP is combating studies and media reports that have found misinformation and disinformation spreading on conservative mass media and online platforms — and perhaps why it may be difficult for those warning about the problem to make much headway.

Republicans argue that the media is ignoring bad information coming from the left, and that the issue is political. They point to WPA’s findings, for instance, that 59% of Democrats believe Hispanic voters are becoming more likely to support Republicans due to misinformation, as opposed to their social views, concerns about the economy and illegal immigration or Trump’s aggressive Hispanic-outreach program.

“This is insulting and it explains why Democrats are losing Hispanic voters,” tweeted Danielle Alvarez, the Cuban-American communications director for the Republican National Committee.

TRUTH OR POLITICS?

It’s true that many of the calls to fight disinformation come from the left. And while Republicans have at times highlighted what they argue is disinformation from their opponents, they often dismiss disinformation as a non-issue exaggerated by Democrats and talk about efforts by the government and press to stop the spread of bad information as attempts to control free speech.

“There is not a definition of disinformation because it’s not a thing. It’s a farce,” said David Custin, a Hispanic GOP consultant who said Democrats began making an issue of disinformation in Spanish-language media when they realized Trump had significantly improved his standing among Latino voters, particularly in Miami-Dade County.

“It’s a defensive mechanism for branding purposes because they’re getting their clocks cleaned in the Hispanic community.”

Sources who spoke to the Miami Herald for this article pointed to false and misleading claims about COVID vaccines as an unambiguous example of the dangers of inaccurate content. One oft-debunked claim about the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines was that they would alter the DNA of the inoculated.

With the November elections approaching, the discussion around misinformation and disinformation is becoming more of a campaign issue.

“Disinformation is inherently political,” said Jose Dante Parra, a Democratic consultant involved in a study last year that found that conservative radio hosts on Miami’s Spanish-language radio spread lies around the Jan. 6 insurrection.

And that, Parra said, makes progress more difficult.

“The moment you start attacking disinformation you’ll be labeled as the left. Or worse, a socialist,” said Parra, who advised the late-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, and more recently the Florida Democratic Party.

Victoria McGroary, the executive director of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ Political Action Committee, which says it has invested six figures in fighting Spanish-language disinformation with a fact-checking YouTube channel, said the people calling misinformation a political issue are the ones doing the politicizing.

“Misinformation gets to the heart of the safety and well-being of our families and our communities. It is very dangerous and it is very important that Democrats push back against that,” she said. “It’s the same people who are perpetrating this misinformation that’s targeting our communities that are saying that it’s not a problem.”

BREAKDOWN IN COMMUNICATION

Two Florida International University professors told the Miami Herald that loose definitions about misinformation and disinformation have contributed to the politicization of the issue, as has the increasingly extreme nature of political debate.

Eduardo Gamarra, a politics and international relations professor, said both Republicans and Democrats are responsible for spreading misinformation and both should be addressed, which is hard to do in a highly polarized political environment. Gamarra said the media has also complicated the issue by at times unintentionally spreading bad information which has harmed their efforts to highlight problems and exacerbated Republicans’ allegations that mainstream media outlets are biased.

“The media has a responsibility to fact check everything,” Gamarra said. “And sometimes you reproduce material that you don’t know is false. That’s why I think fact checking is such a crucial dimension of this.”

Very often, when misinformation is spread on either social media or Spanish-language radio, it comes in the form of exaggeration, Gamarra added. The person spreading this information will take something small that is true and exaggerate it to make the problem seem much bigger than it actually is, he said. Then the information will become the popular belief.

It’s also crucial to remember the difference between misinformation and disinformation, he added, saying the two are sometimes conflated in problematic ways. Misinformation is when the spread of the information is not intentional, it’s accidental. Disinformation is when the person spreads false information with the intent to deceive others.

Political science Professor Dario Moreno said the coarsening of political discourse has made it more difficult for people of different political persuasions to agree on basic facts. The Republican Party’s mass characterization of Democrats as socialists — something Democrats have called disinformation — is a good example, he said.

“I think one of the things that arose out of the 2020 campaign in the Hispanic community is that Democratic candidates were being labeled as socialist and as far-left,” said Moreno. “But how is that different from the president [Joe Biden] calling the Republicans fascists? It’s the result of polarization. Our political discourse is so bad that the line has been blurred between legitimate information or criticism about your opponent and things that are just outrageous.”

The GOP, he added, used events of the 2020 election to stoke Hispanic immigrants’ fears and insecurities about authoritarian governments and socialism in places like Venezuela and Cuba. The defund the police movement and Bernie Sanders running as a democratic socialist were ideas Republicans exploited.

“Maybe there was misrepresentation,” he said, “but that’s politics as usual.”