Combatting Election Disinformation in Non-English Languages

On July 31st, 2024, US Senators Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) and Alex Padilla (D-CA) convened a panel of civil society experts to discuss the challenge of combating disinformation in non-English languages in the lead-up to the 2024 US election. The panelists discussed various reasons for why and how election disinformation targets minority communities and the steps needed to mitigate these threats.

The panelists included:

• Jessica González, CEO, Free Press Action
• Mekela Panditharatne, Senior Counsel – Elections and Government, The Brennan Center for Justice
• Dr. Nicol Turner Lee, Director – Center for Technology Innovation, The Brookings Institution
• Maria Curi, Axios Tech Policy Reporter

What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Maria Curi:

Along with Senator Padilla, who will also join us today, and their colleagues have introduced the Language Inclusive Support and Transparency for Online Services Act or the LISTOS Act. And that's to improve multilingual large language models, automated decision-making systems, and content moderation practices to better protect non-English speaking communities. Without further ado, please help me in welcoming Senator Luhan.

Senator Ben Ray Luján (D-NM):

Thank you very much for that kind introduction. Can we all thank Maria for being willing to moderate today? Everybody.

I want to also recognize and thank everyone who's joining us with a live stream today. I'm sure that we have people connecting from all over the United States, and I would not be surprised if it were from all parts of the world with this important conversation that should be taking up more air, more oxygen, and getting more attention because the benefits are profound and without action, the downside of this will prevent people from getting to the polls. I'm going to talk a little bit about that today with the impact of lies that are out there. I'm not talking about political speak but about facts. A lot of my colleagues often point to the work that former president Ronald Reagan and former speaker Tip O'Neill did and how they could compromise and find common ground in policy. That was at a time when people from both sides of the aisle could stipulate to facts, and then you would grow from there. You'd work from there. You'd find the negotiation to be able to find that compromise. What's happening today in Washington DC, it is hard to find agreement even on facts.

So, let's talk about some of those today. I'm very grateful to the panelists who are here, who have taken the time to study, to research, to document, to include points from data collection that are factual to what's happening and what's not happening across the country in this space. This is a brilliant group of media, technology, and election researchers and advocates with invaluable insights to share. So I want to thank them very much for being here today and being willing to speak up and continuing this conversation in so many areas.

Voting is a fundamental right. I hope we all agree on that. That should be the premise where we begin. Voting is a fundamental right. The right to vote is sacred. It's inherent to what it means to be an American and is the foundation for our democracy. It ensures that the will of our diverse citizens is heard and represented.

Now, in order for democracy to function, people need to trust that their votes matter, that their votes will be counted, that their access to the polls will not be obstructed.

Experts have resoundingly verified that the United States has one of the most secure election administration systems in the world. Yet in recent years, falsehoods were spread and are still being spread to sow doubt in our elections.

We all know how these falsehoods played out in 2020. If left unchecked in 2024, there is a serious risk that history will repeat itself or even worse, this issue doesn't just impact DC; our nation's capital, the halls of Congress, and the people who work in this building. Election denialism has led to the harassment of thousands of poll workers. According to the 2024 poll from the Brennan Center for Justice, and we'll hear more about this, I'm certain later today, after the perpetuation of that lie that the 2020 election was stolen, 70% of election workers said that they'd been harassed more.

The poll also shows that the level of harassment is higher for election workers in majority-minority counties where most residents are Latino or other people of color. Election lies and harassment have contributed to a major turnover among poll workers, impacting counties in New Mexico and across the nation. We're losing people with decades of knowledge about how to administer free and fair elections. They're being bullied and harassed based on lies.

Now finally, I want to talk about voter suppression. Falsehoods about the time, place, and manner of an election and falsehoods about voter eligibility requirements are spread with the intent to suppress voter turnout. Plain and simple, these have been documented. They have been spread. We don't see the entities that have been carrying some of this being willing to take them down or to call them lies when in fact, they are lies. That's a problem. And similar to the issue of election worker harassment, the issue of falsehoods to suppress turnout disproportionately hurts communities of color and multilingual communities.

In 2022, disinformation in Spanish remained up on social media sites for longer than disinformation in English. So I joined multiple members to implore the tech companies to take action to protect Latino and Spanish-speaking communities. This issue was a driving factor for why Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA) and I introduced the LISTOS Act, the Language Inclusive Support and Transparency for Online Services Act, to improve content moderation practices online to better protect non-English speaking communities. According to the Pew Research Institute, Latinos are much more likely to prefer getting news from social media, which is portrayed as true or false on online platforms has a larger impact on minority communities.

Now the the responsibility doesn't only lie with social media companies. We all have a role to play in the effort to fight election disinformation, federal, state, and local governments, local media, national media, and social media. Additionally, our families, friends, parents, and teachers, they all play a role. It's critical that we continue investing resources in building media and civic literacy in all languages commonly spoken in this country, especially about how elections are run and where to go for trusted official information.

Now, I have the honor of introducing a friend of ours, a friend of mine, a person who has led with integrity and has been very personally involved in many of these conversations because of the work that he has done in the past as well.

It is a dear friend of mine, Alex Padilla, United States Senator from California. He'll be sharing his perspectives today. In addition to being a CHC colleague, Senator Padilla serves on the Senate Committee on the Budget, Committee on Environment and Public Works, Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, the Committee on the Judiciary and is the chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Citizenship Border Safety. Additionally, he serves on the Senate Rules Committee, which has oversight responsibility over matters relating to federal elections, and he brings invaluable experience as the former Secretary of State of California. Welcome our friend Alex Padilla.

Senator Alex Padilla (D-CA):

Thank you, my brother, Senator Ben Ray Luján. Give him a round of applause, please.

When he first approached me about a month ago about this event, of course, you always say yes when Ben Ray asks; that's a no-brainer. But the topic especially, I know, is important and obviously very timely as we stand here today. I believe if my math is right, 97 days till the election, which may seem like it's coming up quickly; much sooner is the day by which ballots begin to go out to military and overseas voters before we even get to the early voting vote by mail conversation before we get to the election day conversation. So again, the subject matter today is important and very, very timely. So thank you, Ben Ray, for bringing us all together for this conversation.

And I'm sure there's going to be a list of to-do items when we wrap up today, but specifically to combating disinformation. And I appreciate how you laid it out, right?

It's not just disinformation in general, specifically when it comes to when, where, and how to vote. I'm precise in this because of my experience as Secretary of State for California; when we were trying to promote election integrity, ballot access initiatives, you immediately get into the dangerous space of those who are suspect of no, no, it's censorship or you can't censor candidates and free speech and what people are running for or attacks on opponents. We're not even delving there. We're specifically focusing on people exercising their right to vote as protected under federal law without any harassment or unnecessary barriers. And yes, election disinformation and deception are barriers and violations of the spirit and the intent of the Voting Rights Act.

Combating disinformation is nothing new. It's not something that came about with social media and AI. It's always been an issue. It's been a challenge, but it's been particularly heightened because of technology and because of the political times that we're living in.

I mean, I thought 2020 was going to be the most consequential election of our lifetime and it was given what we were experiencing at the time. But the nature of our politics, the bitterness, the division, the polarization, plus the increasingly sophisticated technologies that are out there and international dynamics, it's not just the potential domestic interference with elections and our right to vote, but foreign interference with elections and our right to vote have really raised the stakes like never before.

So Ben Ray asked me to come and share some of the experiences that I had as Secretary of State that can apply to these conversations. I'm proud to say that we are not the only ones, but maybe we were amongst the first, certainly at the largest scale when I was secretary of state of California, to think about just investments in resources for voters across the state to know their rights, know their options for participating in the elections, but being specifically mindful and intentional about resources and support for voters who prefer a language other than English.

Because in a diverse country, in a diverse state, in our diverse communities, that's a lot of people and there's no English proficiency requirement to be a voter. If you're a citizen of age, otherwise eligible, you have a right to vote and we should support that participation. And so, again, California's not the only one. New Mexico's not the only one. There are many communities across the country and I'll take a moment just to say sorry, not sorry, but this is personal for me. I'm a proud son of immigrants from Mexico. My parents came from Mexico in the 1960s with no urgency or a desire necessarily at the time to someday become citizens. Political experience, a life experience kind of opened their eyes in the 1990s in California. And I remember the experience of helping them study for the naturalization test, for example, right? That's not voting. That's an important decision and action that hasn't always been friendly or easy for people whose primary language is other than English. I can only imagine what would've been going through that in this day and age. They eventually became citizens, registered to vote immediately, and never missed an election after that. But again, can't imagine with them what they would've experienced with the disinformation online and other things that we have to combat these days.

It's also, I think, an acute challenge because as time goes on, it's not just that the technology that we're up against is increasing in sophistication, but there are such low barriers to entry to those platforms, to those tools for people who want to cause harm by misleading, by not just misinforming but by disinforming the public of what's going on and how to participate. And so one of the things that I chose to do when I was Secretary of State is, okay, let's not just play defense here. We did put in place tools for monitoring social media sites. For example, reporting to the platforms. Hey, as Secretary of State, I can tell you this is inaccurate is wrong. It needs to be taken down. I'm not in the censorship business, Twitter, Facebook, or whatever they're called these days. You have public standards that your users need to abide by. You tell me if you think this is right, then I guess. But if you agree that this is wrong, take it down.

And we actually got pretty good at that. Being able to identify the misinformation and disinformation and have the platforms relatively quickly act on that. Those are one example of playing defense here, or if I was even more helpful, is playing offense. We realized that wait a minute before we have to uneducate somebody from the bad information that they might've been exposed to; we're probably better off getting to them first with accurate information. And so we can inform people early in the election cycle before the craziness of October, before the November election of number one: Elections Officer in most states in the nation, that has who are trusted sources, but if you have questions about when or how to vote, don't just click on any email that happens to come into your inbox.

There's this place called the County Elections Office and a diverse communities by law, they're required to offer information in languages other than English. When a population density of non-English speakers reaches a certain threshold. So, we have certain things going for us. There's this office called the Secretary of State, the Chief Elections Officer in most states in the nation, that has a tremendous amount of resources and information. Again, maybe it's for or against what may be on the ballot, maybe who the candidates are, but if nothing else, the basic information of where, how to register to vote, and how to cast your ballot. And so if you do have questions later on, people know who to go to. Tremendously, tremendously helpful. And we had wisdom in the California legislature and the governor at the time to help us invest in some of those efforts.

So that's maybe one of the takeaways here.

How do we not just talk about federal resources and tools but go state by state and advocate for specific state resources and initiatives to reach out to voters? Again, California, very diverse. It wasn't just about information in Spanish, but a number of AAPI languages and beyond; given the diversity of the California population, we also knew that just the Secretary of standalone, as handsome as he was, wasn't going to convince everybody. Sometimes, you need nonpolitical figures to help carry the message. Message carriers are important, right?

So I was shameless in reaching out, not just to county and city officials as partners, but being more strategic in meeting people where they are. We partnered with library systems. We partnered with public transit agencies to help disseminate the information, QR codes websites again in a number of different languages. We partnered with supermarket chains, we partnered with professional sports teams even as a Dodger fan standing at Candlestick Park promoting voter information in San Francisco.

We did what we had to do. We partnered with banks, we partnered with ride share companies, with anybody and everybody that would help us get the word out on a non-partisan basis with this. And we had tremendous results, tremendous voter satisfaction in terms of their experiences, tremendous participation rates, which is the ultimate measure, and of course negligible problems when it came to the actual election itself. So a lot of reasons why we're dealing with this. A lot of things to already point to of innovation happening in local governments and at the state level that we can build on here in a national conversation. And yes, I'm proud to be a partner with you on the LISTOS Act here at the federal level, but let's keep our eyes on the price. How can we maximize our resources and our networks in informing people of when, where, and how to vote, including voting early, including vote by mail, as well as in-person on election day, if that is a voter's choice.

And I will make a plug for this. Senator Luján, sorry I keep calling you Ben Ray. Senator Luján mentioned the challenge that a lot of poll workers and election workers are experiencing right now with threats and harassment. It may not be easy, but given that it's even more critical to do our own recruitment and retention of friendly, culturally competent and sensitive, linguistically competent and sensitive poll workers and election workers because imagine that somebody like maybe my mom going to vote for the first time, maybe a little nervous, might have a question. If there is somebody more friendly and welcoming who can comfort them and assist them in that exercise of their fundamental right as an American citizen, that is extremely, extremely powerful.

So I will leave it at that. And there's some tremendous brain trust here. Look forward to hearing how this conversation goes. The ideas that come about and the to-do list that I was talking about earlier is a to-do list that you're going to hand to me as a member of the Judiciary Committee. So thank you all very, very much. Maria, over to you. Thank you.

Maria Curi:

Alrighty, thank you so much for that. Senator Padilla, I think we can get started here with just some introductions. If you can explain what your organizations are doing around this issue and election integrity, and why don't we just start going down the line with Dr. Turner Lee.

Dr. Nicol Turner Lee:

Hello, I'm happy to be here. Nicol Turner Lee, I'm a senior fellow in governance studies and the director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution. I am so happy to be in this seat because I'm looking at my friend for many, many years just looking at the exploitation, manipulation of multi-language communities, people of color, like Black Americans and others. It's been at the forefront, I think, of many of the diversity and equity challenges that we've had, particularly when it comes to voting disenfranchisement.

And so the opportunity to speak about how we actually approach this is both humbling and it suggests that we still have a lot of work to do in this space. At Brookings, we've launched the AI equity Lab, which is a vehicle for workshopping, how we get to non-discriminatory AI, anti-racist AI, and in particular, we're looking at it from this scenario, ways in which vulnerable impacted populations sort of interact with these emerging existing technologies.

Happy to share more about that as the conversation evolves, but we're sort of the back of the napkin, and our differentiator is that we actually bring effective communities together versus having these be pie-in-the-sky conversations. We're talking about education. We got educators; we're talking about civil rights and education. We got civil rights groups, and that applies to healthcare, employment, hiring, misinformation, voting as well as journalism, and a whole slew of other stuff.

Then I'd be shameless if I didn't say this, but I do have a book that just came out. The senator had one up here. He doesn't endorse anything in the book, but I will show you. It is called Digitally Invisible, and the book is a labor of love after about 30 years of working on issues to advance universal connectivity.

So it's a conversation really about the kind of work that we need to do to not only address the issue we're addressing today but to make sure people are connected so they can participate in this digital ecosystem, which for millions of Americans before the pandemic, they were offline, and to this day they still are.

So you get this wherever books are sold, but it's a really compelling glimpse into one how old I really am when you see how far back I go with regards to the work in this space, but more importantly, centering the conversation we've heard from the senators that we have to center communities and particularly communities of color in the digital conversations that we're having. So happy to be here, Maria. Thank you. Thank you.

Jessica González:

Hi, y'all. I'm Jessica Gonzalez. I'm the co-CEO of a media advocacy organization called Free Press and its sister lobbying organization, Free Press Action. I first just want to thank everyone who's here because the more we spread awareness about what's going on, the more we can help people find access to quality news and information and inoculate against disinformation.

Free Press does this work in four ways. We build public campaigns to hold tech companies accountable. You may have heard in 2020 of Stop Hate for Profit; you may have heard in 2022 of Stop Toxic Twitter. Those were campaigns to exact economic pressure to pull advertisers down from companies that were failing to moderate hate and lies online across languages that were giving special treatment to VIP users and not holding them accountable like they do the rest of us. We raise awareness about election disinformation and the disparities across languages. On this, we coordinated a campaign called "Ya Basta Facebook," pointing out how Spanish and English language moderation efforts were extremely different.

Relatedly, we evaluate tech companies' policies and enforcement of those policies. And finally, we push Congress for structural public policy change, such as data privacy and digital civil rights legislation, that would help curtail the targeting of hate and lies at certain communities based on protected characteristics. So I'll stop there and turn it over to you.

Mekela Panditharatne:

Hi everyone. I'm Mekela. I'm a Senior Counsel with the Brennan Center for Justice. I'm really delighted to be here with my co-panelists and delighted to be speaking here. As some of you may know, the Brennan Center does a really wide variety of work. Some of the items that I'll just uplift here are in the 2022 midterm elections, we did a tracking of major narratives related to the election process on major social media platforms in both English and Spanish and published an analysis of the tracking results. This year, we are convening groups, including groups representing communities of color and communities with people who speak languages other than English, to share information about what we're seeing in terms of election falsehoods that are gaining traction, the impact of election falsehoods on communities, as well as identifying some of the major election falsehoods that we are seeing across the country.

We're doing some polling on effective counter messages and publishing that and sharing that information with partners as well. And then of course, we do a range of sort of policy work. We have a policy essay series on AI and democracy. We're working on a more detailed policy agenda on AI and democracy. We also have resources that we've published for voters to help them navigate the information and environment, including when it comes to some of the new challenges that voters are facing due to the proliferation of AI. That's just some of what we do. Hope that helps.

Maria Curi:

That's a lot. And you're pointing to a lot of research that happens at Brookings, and I was wondering if you can take us through the trends that you're observing in election disinformation, specifically for Spanish and other non-English languages.

Mekela Panditharatne:

Sure. So at the Brennan Center, as I mentioned, we did tracking of major election narratives related to the election process on social media platforms in the 2022 midterm elections. To clarify, we were not flagging content for social media platforms. We were simply wanting to understand the election conversation better and explain that more detailed understanding to the public. One of the things that we found, which is very much consonant with the work of other disinformation scholars, is that there are these core false election narratives that repeat and recur across election cycles, and that is true for both English and Spanish. So these core falsehoods include false narratives about mail voting, voting machines, mail ballot drop boxes, false allegations of malfeasance by election officials, and what we say is that election deniers don't reinvent the wheel, so to speak. There are these core narratives that they turn to, and they are sticky in a sense, which is both troubling but also helps us address some of these issues and prepare for what's ahead.

Having said that, there are certain narratives or rumors that tick up in elections or are relatively new, or are more emphasized. One of the rumors that we're seeing particularly take off in Spanish this year is that the presidential election may be canceled. Of course, the constitution and federal law require the presidential election to take place this year as usual, but there is an unfortunate rumor circulating that the election may be canceled due to a national emergency or by presidential fiat, and this has an unfortunate vote suppression nexus as well.

Maria Curi:

Got it. So you walked us through a few that are some core falsehoods across all languages, and then a specific one that's targeting Spanish language speakers. Dr. Turner Lee, can you explain some of the trends that you are observing? Who's being targeted? How is that targeting taking place?

Dr. Nicol Turner Lee:

There are a couple of things I want to actually pass on from Mekela's comments, whereas I think what we heard from both senators, a lot of the misinformation has been directed towards further disenfranchising voters, particularly Latino voters, by changing poll locations times, disqualifying people in terms of eligibility. I think it's really important for us to group this conversation also into three buckets, right? First bucket, and this research has been done by my colleagues at Brookings, Gabe Sanchez and others, is we have this whole challenge of news consumption, right? And a lot of that news consumption is very much tied to those of us who have been around for a while where media ownership rules have landed when it comes to the presentation of local media, right? Local media that has been linguistically tailored to Spanish-speaking populations. We just had a conversation around this at Brookings, where the lack of media ownership rules has made for this big foray of social media content to be the go-to for various populations where Latinos being one of the huge consumers of social media content.

So I think that has a lot to do with a lot of things that we've heard so far. The other thing is this homogenization of groups, particularly people of color and Latino populations. I mean, I've come from New York, I can tell you right now that all Latinos are not the same in terms of background, the same thing with Black Americans, but we continue to see this narrative when it comes to misinformation for Spanish speaking populations, that it's a whole of community approach, which allows for the co-optation and manipulation of communities around issues of fear and hate and lies, things that show up in the news that all of a sudden are constructed for Latino communities that have nothing to do with that. My dear friend Antonio Tijerino constantly reminds me from the Hispanic Heritage Foundation that not all these messages cater to every aspect of the cultural diversity of the Latino population.

So we have to deconstruct the fact that people are consuming news and social media, and then second, that we're sort of seen as the same people, which allows for the greater manipulation of communities. And then I think the third thing that sort of ties into this disenfranchisement and misinformation is the micro-targeting. I mean, it was really clear during the previous election cycles that we were micro-targeted. I mean, let's just drop the mic. Let's just move on.

I've been on panels where people say, well, that's a falsehood. I said, well, I could give you some data. People were micro-targeted, and it's so interesting because back then, let's say in the campaign of Hillary Clinton, it was micro-targeting from a neural network standpoint, if you all remember, which was way before generative AI. We were talking about certain communities being fed images that led to mental stipulation in terms of the darkening of faces or giving people this neural response to a candidate today is more dangerous because generative AI has done a couple of things when it comes to microtargeting. One, it micro-targets based on the perceived language that people are using and interacting with, which many of us in this room, if you don't know what I'm going to tell you, generative AI is only trained on 700 languages. It does not account for the different linguistic diversity that we actually see among people even sitting in this room.

But then two, that microtargeting can get at what I call these blind spots or vulnerabilities within our community because not only does it take us as a big group, but then it's able to drill down on some of those perceptive fears that come with a whole range of larger messages and ideological constraints that actually are playing themselves out every day. I think this whole idea of identity politics is a whole other conversation that we need to have. My point is, to your point, Marie, I'm getting there, is that the conversations that we have around misinformation and how it really obstructs the voting process need to be combined with what we know about how that media treats us.

And I think there's an effective relationship that we often don't get into, which has a lot to do. I'm looking at Jessica; I've known her for many, many, many years. We had no kids when we knew each other. Now, we both have kids. But the thing is, I think about that often in terms of just where do people go for truthful information if most of the information that we're being fed, particularly being exploited by Spanish language communities, is not coming from a place of safety and protection.

So hopefully, we'll pick that up a little bit, but I want to add that in as an extension, Mekela, what you're talking about, this is gone beyond just general disenfranchisement, right? It's really gone into the space of which we really have to be conscious about what that could actually affect and what it could do for our community. Thank you.

Maria Curi:

Yeah, and I appreciate you raising AI and this concept of microtargeting because we know that a lot of campaigns are now using some of these tools to tailor their messages, not just for Hispanic populations, but specific. We aren't the same. Jessica, can you talk a little bit about what Free Press has found in terms of election disinformation and that impact on daily Spanish speakers?

Jessica González:

Yeah, this is really timely because we released poll results last week. We over-sample daily Spanish speakers. So these are dominant Spanish speakers, not just Latinos, Latinos who speak Spanish on a daily basis. So, I have some slides that I'm going to run through very quickly, and I will provide them later. So don't feel the need to track all this, but what we're trying to get at here is what is the broader information environment that is setting us up for this crisis that we're facing on Spanish language disinformation? And here's what we found. The first slide, oh, whoa. How do we get here? You want to stand up? It might be better for me to run it here.

Okay. Alright. So we see daily Spanish speakers spending more time online and more time using social media compared to other US adults. They are more frequent users of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube. For news in particular, I promise I'll get you these later because I'm going to hustle. Daily Spanish speakers are more likely to share and receive news article links.

About 50% of daily Spanish speakers say they encounter stories they believe are misinformation. Very often, or some of the time, many of them use Google or other search engines to fact check. But daily Spanish speakers are far more likely than other folks to rely on friends and family members to help them fact check. I see the Latinos in the audience nodding like, that tracks. Daily Spanish speakers are far more likely to seek out culturally relevant news and information. I think this is really important as we seek out policy change, we need to meet this problem with trusted news and information sources. Daily Spanish speakers, despite seeking out all this information, are more likely to report that they do not feel very well informed about local elections.

Actually, all Americans don't feel very informed about local elections, daily Spanish speakers, even less so. For instance, they're far more likely to say they don't have enough information about local elections for mayor, for judge, for city or county ballot measures. Far less likely to report that they have enough information about state legislative races, congressional elections, and even the issues that are most important to them. And interestingly, here, we ran this poll, we over-sampled people of color. Only 28% of all adults said that they feel very well-informed when voting in local elections. But Latinos and Asian Americans were even less likely to say that they feel very well-informed. We couldn't quite, I suspect this is a language barrier issue, but my research director would say that is not statistically significant enough and have to dig for more data. But we should look into that.

So I'm going to hustle back over here because I'm not quite done. I want to sum this up. Here's what we're dealing with. Daily Spanish speakers spend more time online, more time searching for culturally relevant news and information, yet finding less information they need to participate in elections. They're also feeling the effects of social media companies' lack of investment in Spanish language content moderation. That means more hate, more lies, and more harassment gets through to them. In prior election cycles, we saw threats of violence at political events, and polling were far more likely to be left up in Spanish than in English on the major social media sites. We called attention to this, and a 2022 study from the Global Project against Hate and Extremism found that fear of violence or harassment at the polls suppresses political participation. And that Black and Latino voters were more likely to feel fear about going to the polls and more likely to indicate that that may impinge upon their voting.

So the current media environment is not meeting Spanish speaker's information needs. It's stirring up fear of harassment and violence that contributes to voter suppression. So I look forward to getting into the solutions.

Maria Curi:

And of course, there's Spanish and English. There are many other languages. So I'm hoping that we can get into how speakers of different languages are being impacted by disinformation voters, election officials, people working polls, and Dr. Turner Lee, I think you can get us started there.

Dr. Nicol Turner Lee:

I think what's very interesting is that we're seeing similar trends again with Black voters as well, right? I think I just recently it was your data actually that I cited in a conversation yesterday, if I'm not mistaken about that. Yeah, I did. About Black voters, increasingly over 50% also being persuaded by misinformation and disinformation. I mean, at the end of the day, I think the stakes are really high, right? Maria in this. And I think your data is so telling about how are we getting people as an informed electorate to go out there and actually vote for people, not just in national campaigns, but in local elections, but how are we also quelling it? And I think that that is a universal problem that we are facing in this 21st century digital age. And I know we didn't specifically, so I jumped right to AI, but I know we didn't specifically say in this conversation that we're going to talk about AI, but AI is actually increasing the velocity of spread because not only are we, it used to be the poor seniors we're the ones responsible for a lot of misinformation.

If you read the Pew Poll a couple years ago, they said seniors tend to share more misinformation just basically hitting the share button or sending it to somebody, right? I said, try to ask my mother, why do you keep telling me that Smokey Robinson's dead? He's not. I just saw him on tv, right? But they don't read that stuff. But now we're actually seeing it where AI can actually do some of that assistive work to spread or to construct messages that make it much harder to disentangle. We didn't talk about this too, and I hear the senators as well. Another universal problem are deep fakes and voice manipulation as we see it with generative AI.

My daughter is 17; she came up to me the other day. She said, Mom, say hello. I did. And then she showed me how she had extracted my voice to be able to have it say other things. We are all familiar in the primaries or what happened to Joe Biden's voice with robocalls.

We've seen a lot of progress, many of you in this room when it comes to really trying to clamp down on that type of technology. But again, Latina, Black, Asian American, and Indigenous voters who tend to be the most vulnerable, who also tend to be the biggest voting block, by the way, tend to be persuaded by new technologies that are able to come in and micro-target. And so I would just say this is a challenge that hopefully, when we talk about recommendations going forward, we can dig into, but it's something that's universally affecting people of color and particularly marginalized communities.

Maria Curi:

Mekela, did you have anything to add to that?

Mekela Panditharatne:

Sure. So I mean, this picks up on some of the things that were said earlier, but even though I mentioned that there are common false election process narratives across English and Spanish, it does seem to be the case that there is a higher level of exposure. There may be a high level of exposure for certain false election narratives among Spanish-speaking communities. For example, NALEO put out a poll in 2022 that indicated that respondents from Spanish-speaking Latino households were more likely to report that they had seen or heard a lot about the big lie compared to respondents from English-speaking Latino households. There may be a high level of exposure to certain false election narratives among Spanish-speaking… So that's one thing to note.

I also wanted to talk a little bit about the retrenchment that we're seeing in terms of content moderation on these major social media platforms. That's been a very significant trend. We are seeing major social media platforms cut back on their trust and safety teams even prior to this. As has been mentioned, there was really a dearth or a lack of adequate investment in resources in staffing dedicated to moderating Spanish language content and other content in other languages in the US context and of course, abroad.

But this discussion is focused on the US, and I just wanted to give an example what an experience that really highlighted to me how important this is. As I mentioned earlier, we had done tracking in both English and Spanish around false election narratives in the 2022 midterm elections. I am not a Spanish speaker, but of course, I have colleagues that are; we have a whole Brennan on the Espanol website, which is a Spanish version of Brennan's website. But as we were putting together the glossaries of terms that we were tracking in English and Spanish, we conducted outreach to community partners and to Spanish language experts to inform the Spanish glossary. And we found that there were critical distinctions between some of the terms. Just a few examples include that there wasn't an easy Spanish translation for the word gerrymandering. We were told that there was a specific Spanish word that was used to refer to election workers in the Texas Rio Grande Valley that wasn't necessarily used in other parts of the US. There were several possible translations for the term election integrity caucus, which is used by election deniers. So this really underscored to me how critical it is to have language expertise within the platforms, adequate human staffing. We know that enforcement is also nowadays a combination of algorithmic enforcement and human enforcement.

And so the adequate attention to the accuracy of algorithms applied in languages other than English is really critically important. And it's really important to have both language expertise and cultural competency in forming that process as well as, of course, adequate human staffing at the platforms.

Maria Curi:

Yeah, those are some really great examples there. So just in the interest of time, I'm hoping that we can tackle two questions at once, which is what are the solutions to tackle disinformation in this election year and what resources can you point people to? Dr. Turner Lee, we can start with you on that one.

Dr. Nicol Turner Lee:

Sure. I thought you were going to go to Jessica next. You can start with Jessica, you want to go next?

Jessica González:

Okay, sure. I'm glad I'm going next. I want a hundred percent endorse everything you just said about what's happening at the tech platforms. I thought we were going to talk about risks, shall we? It seems like we covered that. Yeah. Okay.

Well, I think we have a twin crises here, dwindling local journalism and surging online manipulation efforts. And I think we have to address both disinformation. I think Dr. Turner Lee here has laid out in detail how it's becoming more personalized, more individualized, and that is based on mass quantities of demographic and behavioral data that tech companies and data brokers have been permitted to collect data about all of us. They're using that then to micro-target us based on our perceived beliefs and vulnerabilities. And the tech companies have failed to put in effective safeguards.

And I feel like you very adequately covered that. The investments they've made in content moderation have been lackluster overall, and especially in non-English languages. I've talked a lot about Spanish, but when we started doing this work, we suddenly heard from the Vietnamese community, from the Filipino community, from the Chinese community, from the Korean American community, the problem's even worse for Asian American languages because there's so many Spanish speakers in the US that there's been maybe more resources. But overall completely under-resourced.

Disinformation isn't the only tactic that's being used. There's really a manipulation effort underway to saturate people with content that drives apathy. So we to got to just realize that the game is not completely the same as it was four years ago. And four years ago, we had more beat reporters and more local journalists than we do today. We've lost 50% of local journalists over the past 20 years, and this is a real problem.

And we saw that that bore out in our polling results. People the more local election to get across race and ethnicity, the more people said, we don't have enough information. So the solutions, I think there's four sets of actors we ought to be talking about. Social media platforms, we've talked a lot about that already. They need to moderate content across language. No special treatment for VIPs, proactively push accurate election information across languages. Don't allow the big lie content. Just because it happened four years ago doesn't mean that it isn't persuasive. It's informing people. It's pushing apathy. It's incited violence. Y'all know that better than most because you were here.

And it unfairly sows distrust in democratic institutions, and I'm worried about that. The erosion of trust.

Journalists have to do a better job, and it's tough because there's fewer of them, but they have to do a better job of educating the public about the prevalence of online manipulation. People, all of us, have a responsibility to slow down in times of crisis and chaos. You'll remember that certain politicians have a plan to stir chaos. That is the design, because that's when we get sloppy. We got to slow down and fact check and be careful.

And then finally, government. So here we are in the Senate Dirksen Building, and I don't know if we'd be in such a dire place right now had Congress passed the American Data Privacy and Protection Act last year. I'm not saying it would've cured everything, but it would've gone a long way to curtailing the collection and use of our private data to target us and to discriminate against us.

But even had we passed that law, that would not have solved the problem. We have to actually get serious about the public good that is journalism and the fact that it's going away and the market isn't going to solve that problem. We actually have to start talking about public funding for local, independent, nonprofit and ethnic media that's been under-resourced forever. And if we really want to make sure that we are inoculating folks against lies and hate and harassment and giving the information that they want and need, we actually have to get serious about that conversation too.

Dr. Nicol Turner Lee:

So everything Jessica said, I ditto, I'll offer a couple of things in the backdrop of this. Just recently, we celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act. We all know that we continuously celebrate the Voting Rights Act with some contention as to whether or not we're going to have, those are the basis for in one respect, it scares me that we're still having the same conversation and stuff that's now changed with our technological footprint. But those are some of the fundamental reasons why we sit in this room, and we just always have to keep in mind the resource at the Brennan Center as well as we try to fight that battle simultaneously. With that, I do think a couple of things I want to add, just on the solution side, we need to have states involved. I mean, Secretaries of State play a critical role in this.

I know at Brookings, I started some work a couple of months ago around the role of state election officials, state Secretary of States, what are they putting out? Is it multilingual? Is it something that people can understand? Is it before the election, during the election, after the election? And is it something that they are putting out trusted ambassadors as senators said, so that they play a role in quelling misinformation? We're not going to do it at the federal level, right? States are also going to have to pay attention to that. I think, as my colleagues have said as well, we do need more pressure for transparency and disclosure, particularly when it comes to our elections by tech companies, the mantra that the Wild West has actually become part of this crash and burn. Permissionless forgiveness no longer works in this ecosystem. There has to be accountability, particularly as we look at our democracy and how people are faring in that.

And I think those fallibilities that we've discussed before, they're getting better. But I do agree with my colleagues, we got to do more because we should not be having this conversation over and over again and with intensity as we get 97 days outside of an election. Third, I do think we need to take up this conversation, as Jessica said, when it comes to not just media ownership with regards to what local truthful stations are we driving, but we also need to put some pressure on news bureaus and news journalists to have the same type of attention to detail when it comes to fact checking across Spanish language, making sure that they're also employing people who actually can do that translation. I appreciate Mekela, I'm not Spanish speaking, but I do, my colleagues are really questioning our newsrooms for the type of diversity that they have to actually make sure that they're doing and they're on the job as well and how they're leveraging technology, but also about who's at the table when they're approaching these headlines and stories.

And then the last thing I would say, which we haven't talked much about is we need people like local, everyday people who are willing to have some stake in the game. My dear colleague and friend and co-chair of the AI Equity Lab calls it, we need some AI ambassadors, some freedom fighters per se. As Senator said, people who are trusted that can go out there and try to push back and reject some of these things that their families are hearing. When I was started in tech, the people who were those ambassadors were young people. The person in the home that could help the mother, the father, the grandmother, sort of disentangle what they were hearing. Unfortunately, my daughter talks about the Illuminati as if it was real sometimes. So I'm not sure if she's the best person, but we need something that is going to do some community training, if that makes sense.

I've been thinking about this idea as it relates Maria to black and brown communities who are the AI freedom fighters that are showing up in churches and libraries and sort of giving that message alongside our secretaries of states to say, Hey, this is what you need to be aware of. I think more of that might help, and it's a grounds up ability to also have people that you trust that you know that may not necessarily be technologically astute. They get. I also agree with Jessica on policy, and one last thing we didn't mention. We need to ensure that all of you in this room have some technological knowledge on how this stuff works. These algorithms are real. These technologies and the cadences behind them have implications. And the more we can have this reciprocity sort of helping each other understand what this technology is, the better informed we will be to put out the right policy that will help address many of these concerns we talked about today.

Maria Curi:

The people on the ground strategy you're referring to is reminding me of how the Affordable Connectivity program is raised and the trusted networks

Dr. Nicol Turner Lee:

And there were millions of people that stood up the Affordable Connectivity Program and to this day are still pushing for this. The senator who said something got into an amendment, we somehow miss that. We often think that we have no agency over this stuff, and I'm going to call that a lie because many of us in this room who work for civil rights organizations and social justice and members of Congress, and we fought for the right stuff. We just had the tools in the hand to be able to fight the right fight.

And so again, I think going forward, I think having this data here, having conversations like this, but really getting to constituents to allow them to also tell you what they know and what they don't know and what they need might also be very helpful going forward.

Maria Curi:

And Mekela, I just want to give you an opportunity to briefly, if there's a solution or a resource you could point people to.

Mekela Panditharatne:

Sure. A couple of things that I would highlight are adequately resourcing election offices to fill information gaps. There are a couple of really important components of the Freedom to Vote Act, such as the components within the Deceptive Practices in Voter Intimidation Act bill. There is also requirements that voter challenges be based on personal knowledge. We know that voter challenges are fueling disinformation about the elections, a couple of important bills to do with AI in the Senate, the AI Transparency and Elections Act, and the Prepare Election Administrators for AI Act. And also just want to highlight that we have a range of policy recommendations that we have developed at the Brennan Center and now are continuing to develop around AI and elections and democracy. And so won't go into 'em here, but would definitely recommend taking a look at the website today.

Maria Curi:

Yeah, it's a lot of ground to cover and I really appreciate you all being here today and all of you for showing up at the end of the day and having this discussion with us, and I'm sure we'll keep the conversation going soon. Thank you.