Fact checkers are fighting election disinformation campaigns targeting Latinos

As the November election nears, journalists work to counter false and misleading information aimed at Spanish-speaking voters.

By Timothy Pratt, Capital and Main

When Rafael Olavarría was out of the U.S. for personal reasons recently, he found himself up early on a Friday doing something new in his job at the two-year-old, Spanish-language fact-checking project Factchequeado.

For the first time, Olavarría was not only correcting a viral falsehood posted on X (formerly Twitter) that he had already corrected three weeks earlier, but also naming the members of Congress who were repeating the disinformation, along with their statements and time stamps. Among them was Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

“One of our missions,” said the former Univisión and CNN en Español journalist, “is to raise the political price of lying.” (Asked by Capital & Main about Cruz’s posting of disinformation, a spokesperson for his office refused to comment and instead took to X to attack the reporter as biased.)

The lie in question revolves around the claim that the U.S. was “secretly” flying 320,000 unauthorized immigrants into the country—an assertion that is untrue and a distorted description of “humanitarian parole,” a federal immigration program granting people from Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba permission to stay in the U.S. for up to two years. People participating in this program are vetted by the federal government and must pay for their transportation to the U.S.