Examining How Latinos Use Social Media for Information and Politics

• In Event: Social Media Misinformation: The Role of Language, Identity, and Marginalization

Abstract

Social media is used by millions of Americans to acquire political news and information. Most of this research has focused on understanding the way social media consumption affects the political behavior and preferences of White Americans. Much less is known about Latinos' political activity on social media, who are not only the largest racial/ethnic minority group in the U.S., but they also continue to exhibit diverse political preferences. Moreover, about 30% of Latinos rely primarily on Spanish-language news sources (Spanish-dominant Latinos) and another 30% are bilingual. Given that Spanish-language social media is not as heavily monitored for misinformation than its English-language counterparts (Valencia 2021, Paul 2021), Spanish-dominant Latinos who rely on social media for news may be more susceptible to political misinformation than those Latinos who are exposed to English-language social media. We address this contention by fielding an original study that sampled 2,636 Latino respondents and 1,370 non-Latino respondents. The Latino respondents were roughly equally divided between English-dominant, Spanish-dominant, and bilingual speakers.

Additionally, over 1,739 respondents provided us with access to their Twitter accounts, access to their Facebook activity, or installed a web-browsing plug-in that enabled us to capture their browsing activity, and/or provided us with their YouTube viewing history. This information allows us to directly monitor their online activity – rather than relying on self-reports. We are thus able to find out the type of information and what issues Latinos follow on social media, as well as what types of mainstream media and other online media they examine. And in the case of bilingual Latinos, we can examine whether they follow specific information on Spanish versus English and vice versa. And, we are able to relate that to their political knowledge, as well as their beliefs in various pieces of misinformation that circulated during the 2022 midterm elections.

Consistent with our expectations, Latinos who rely on Spanish-language social media are more likely to believe in political misinformation, such as the existence of election fraud in the 2020 Presidential election, versus those who use both English and Spanish social media news sources. We observe a similar pattern amongst Latinos on several prominent pieces of misinformation that circulated during the 2022 U.S. elections.

Altogether, our study is one of the first to analyze digital trace data for Latinos in the U.S. across a variety of platforms as well as in both English and Spanish, and together with our self-reported survey data, provides important insights on how it shapes their political preferences and opinions.

Authors

• Marisa Abrajano, University of California, San Diego

• Marianna Garcia, University of California, San Diego

• Aaron Pope, New York University

• Robert Vidigal, Stony Brook University

• Edwin Kamau, New York University

• Joshua A. Tucker, New York University

• Jonathan Nagler, New York University