Los Eco-Ilogicos
Ahead of the 2022 U.S. midterms, Green Latinos and Friends of the Earth partnered with Graphika to study climate misinformation in Spanish-speaking online communities. They found a significant network influenced by right-wing and libertarian accounts, highlighting the impact of false information on Spanish-language climate discussions.
Ahead of the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, reporters, researchers, and lawmakers have sought to understand the spread of false and misleading information among U.S. Spanish-speaking communities online. These efforts have focused on topics including immigration, COVID-19 vaccines, and electoral fraud, but relatively few have examined how the same dynamics impact Spanish-language conversations about climate change.
Green Latinos, with support from Friends of the Earth, commissioned Graphika to study how false and misleading narratives about climate change reach U.S.-based Spanish- speaking communities online. The analysis, linked here, aimed to understand how these narratives spread through the online ecosystem of Spanish-speaking Internet users, the groups and individuals who seed and disseminate them, and the tactics these actors employ.
Through this analysis, Green Latinos identified a sprawling online network of users across Latin America and Spain that consistently amplify climate misinformation narratives in Spanish. While some of these accounts focus specifically on climate-related conversations, the majority promote ideologically right-wing narratives, some of which touch on climate change.
Accordingly, the most influential accounts in this network are users with a libertarian or right-wing outlook who command a large, international Spanish-speaking audience across multiple social media platforms.
