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Against a background of the 2024 election ballot showing choices for presidential and vice presidential candidates, black text reads “Media, disinfo and lies about immigrants in the race to Election Day.” (Photo: Lucy Kang)
We’re in the homestretch to Election Day 2024, and you know what that means: 24/7 coverage of the political horse race through tv, radio and social media. But voters are also getting exposed to false information. In today’s show, we’ll dig into election misinformation and disinformation, and why so much of it is targeting immigrants this year.
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TRANSCRIPT
Lucy Kang: You’re listening to Making Contact. I’m Lucy Kang.
I probably don’t need to tell you that Election Day 2024 is coming up. And it has been a weird ride so far, with Joe Biden dropping out, RFK’s brainworm, assassination attempts, and so many memes. But voters are also getting a major dose of false information along with the good. So today, we’re going to break down how media narratives and mis- and disinformation are impacting this year’s elections.
Let’s dive right in.
First off, we have to consider the media landscape right now in 2024.
Amber Boydstun: Gosh, it’s hard to overstate the importance of mass media in shaping any election, but especially this election.
Lucy Kang: That’s Amber Boydstun, co-chair of the political science department at University of California, Davis, who studies mass media and its impact on politics. By mass media, she means everything from legacy print newspapers like The New York Times to broadcast and cable tv news – and social media. And all of it is highly polarized right now.
Amber Boydstun: And so because our modern media ecosystem is splintered such that we have these different pockets of information that are all talking about the same thing at the same time, whether it be the attempted assassination of President Trump or the ongoing situation in Gaza. They’re talking about it in very different ways. And so, the pockets of information that we select into are really going to make a difference.
Lucy Kang: The polarization of the public and the media are playing a role in the spread of mis- and disinformation. So misinformation is false information that is repeated without the intent to deceive, while disinformation is false information – aka lies – that are spread intentionally. Both are also sometimes known as fake news.
Why are mis- and disinformation shared? It’s actually not mostly due to ignorance. Instead, it seems to have more to do with partisanship and the higher polarization levels. One group of researchers found that people share stories that support their political views and goals, even if they know they might not be true. Studies have found that Republicans are more likely to spread fake news when provoked or when they report higher levels of hatred towards Democrats. Republicans are also more exposed to fake news than Democrats, who tend to consume more mainstream news.
And of course, it doesn’t help when some candidates themselves are spreading lies.
Amber Boydstun: The media are especially important because the Trump campaign has, has traditionally been very – what’s the word? – very fluid in their interaction with the press and in the stories that they put forward. So I’m thinking in particular about vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, who said quite forthright that he was comfortable manifesting stories that weren’t factually accurate in order to draw the people’s attention to an underlying very real policy concern.
Lucy Kang: Here’s J.D. Vance on CNN.
J.D. Vance: If I have to, if I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.
Amber Boydstun: But it’s definitely the case that the mainstream media, the legacy press, mainstream cable news, that’s not the political reality that they, that they are designed to work with. The media doesn’t, it doesn’t play well with politicians who are fabricating things. And, and so I think it leaves the American public at a bit of a loss about exactly how to navigate this informational landscape in 2024.
I think the thing to think about is that in mainstream news, there are journalists there at the helm who are making gatekeeping decisions about what to cover and how to cover it.
Lucy Kang: And it can be a whole different ball game when it comes to social media, which doesn’t rely on the same journalistic standards.
Amber Boydstun: On social media. You don’t have those kinds of guardrails in the same way. And so we as normal humans are just left to our own devices to pick up on things of interest and that means that those things that catch hold are going to be more driven by the whims of, you know, of the populace.
Lucy Kang: And the things that we choose to engage with often are the things we find most emotionally compelling.
And a lot of mis- and disinformation uses this by playing on our emotions and biases and even manipulating latent fears we have. We just heard from Amber Boydstun, who studies mass media and politics at UC Davis. But to dive even deeper, I spoke with Jaime Longoria, manager of research and training for the Disinfo Defense League, a project hosted by the Media Democracy Fund. He specifically researches disinformation and ways to disrupt it.
Jaime Longoria: Mis- and disinformation sort of works through co-opting your emotions. And a lot of that content as you mentioned can be used to, you know, change your worldview or you know push you into action based on the co-option of fear that you might have or you know feelings of insecurity that are, you know, of course, tied to probably, like, very real feelings about how you experience the world. But nevertheless mis and disinfo specifically does rely on that tactic to be quite sticky.
Lucy Kang: The Disinfo Defense League focuses on racialized disinformation, a term they created to refer to disinformation targeting communities of color.
Jaime Longoria: These are strategically created and spread online through media to deceive and manipulate the public, for the purposes of achieving profit, for political gain, and mainly to sustain white supremacy and to sort of reinforce inequalities.
Lucy Kang: And he says racialized disinformation tends to pop up a lot during election years.
Jaime Longoria: We believe that race and specifically racial resentment play a huge central role in election conspiracy belief. So and of course like that exists across party lines, but is more manifested on the right side of the spectrum.
Lucy Kang: There was a specific rhetoric circulating during the midterms in 2022 that used racialized dog whistles.
Jaime Longoria: Most of the narratives that we were following were about targeting mail-in and absentee voting, a lot of content targeting the use of ballot drop boxes, specifically in Arizona.
Mark Strassmann on CBS: Republican Kari Lake, running for governor here, pushes suspicions about shadowy threats to voter integrity, without a shred of proof. Mark Finchem, Arizona’s Republican secretary of state candidate, tweeted, “WATCH ALL DROP BOXES. PERIOD. SAVE THE REPUBLIC.”
Jaime Longoria: The term ballot mules and ballot trafficking was used a lot, which I think was particularly nefarious in terms of its phraseology because it in itself was like a way to co-opt people’s fears, right? You’re talking about a state that’s on the border, and you’re using, like, very racialized, criminalizing terms, such as ballot mules and ballot trafficking that in a lot of people’s minds sort of recall a lot of words that are used to criminalize people of color, specifically people of color who are immigrants in these communities.
Lucy Kang: And then this year, in 2024, there’s been a spike in hateful and racist rhetoric about immigrants.
Jaime Longoria: What we’re seeing is the mainstreaming of a lot of white nationalists and far right conspiracy theories, specifically theories around white genocide and namely the Great Replacement Theory through election mis- and disinformation.
Lucy Kang: The Great Replacement Theory says that the people in power in this country are intentionally supporting non-white immigration to reduce the power of white Americans. And words like “invasions” are dog whistles referring to this conspiracy theory.
Donald Trump: The invasion at our Southern border, we will stop it and we will stop it quickly.
Jaime Longoria: Much of what we’ve been tracking in our day to day has a lot to do with the anxieties of noncitizen voting, which is kind of at the forefront, right? The noncitizen voting stuff is definitely being fueled by claims of an open border. And you know, that’s sort of producing calls for voter ID laws, for hand counting, etc.
But ultimately, I think what we are sort of worried about now is that we’ve already documented one instance of an individual that claimed that they would be present at a polling place to make sure that, quote unquote, “noncitizens” wouldn’t vote.
So, like, we’re keeping an eye on this kind of stuff because ultimately we think that this anxiety around noncitizen voters could end up being a trend that could lead to voter intimidation, mainly targeting people of color who would be these assumed noncitizens across the country. And I think ultimately has the potential to lead to a lot of political violence after the election as well.
Lucy Kang: Yeah, I mean, it is really alarming and frankly terrifying just how much the issue of immigration has been weaponized in the rhetoric this year and just like how immigrants and refugees are cast in these deeply, deeply dehumanizing terms. And this can sometimes lead to real harm to people and communities. I’m wondering if you can mention some concrete examples of how people can be harmed from this type of mis and disinformation.
Jaime Longoria: I mean, I think, you know, one of the biggest examples that we have for this year is what happened in Springfield, Ohio, a couple of weeks ago. And I think we’re still seeing the ramifications of a lot of that disinformation. And we can call this disinformation because a lot of the purveyors of these claims have openly said that they knew that these claims about, you know, Haitian immigrants killing and consuming pets or domesticated animals were false. Nevertheless, like they spread these claims for their own political benefit, right?
I think it was particularly devastating for that community because, you know, now there are calls to deport Haitians from this community, when in reality, like most of them are on temporary protected status. So they are legal documented immigrants. They’ve also experienced bomb threats at schools that have been completely destabilizing for the community.
LK: You know, these narratives still continue to circulate after they’ve been debunked like many, many times. Why is it so hard to fight, and what can we do?
Jaime Longoria: The hard part about it is that mis- and disinformation have a tendency to be very sticky. Just because you correct someone’s belief doesn’t necessarily mean that you will correct their behavior, right?
There’s like a kind of funny example that I always give around this point where let’s say you ate at three restaurants during the day and at the end of the day you ended up getting food poisoning, and you felt really sick and horrible. And you believe that it was restaurant number two that got you sick. And then a week later, you realize that, oh, you actually, like, had gotten sick from, I don’t know, licking, like, the subway pole or something. You completely forgot that you did. You still kind of don’t want to eat at restaurant number two because you associate a lot of those bad feelings to restaurant number two, right?
So there’s also that experience where even if you have the right information, even if you are educated and you know why your previous stance was wrong, that doesn’t necessarily mean that like that can override that behavior that you established from that moment where where you were feeling anxious or where you feeling scared for your future, right?
Lucy Kang: And to make a final, very important point, Jaime is very clear about what is at stake when it comes to election disinformation.
Jaime Longoria: I think it’s important not to forget that the ultimate goal of election disinformation is to make voting less accessible to everyone and specifically, in the immediate future, to make voting less accessible for people of color and disabled people, right?
A lot of what we see during election season and a little bit after, usually tends to be inserted into legislation that is used to strip these rights away, right? And a lot of the things that we’ve been seeing that are supposed to be fixes to these supposed fraud issues, like hand counting ballots, for example, or the use of voter ID, or the use of only hand filled paper ballots, those are all ways to continue to chip away at the Voting Rights Act in general.
And when it comes to disabled people, it’s chipping away at the ADA. And also at the Help Americans Vote Act, which, you know, kind of established that voters with disabilities have private and independent methods of voting. So I think that that’s the bigger picture here, right, that a lot of times election mis and disinformation is a means to that end, and it’s not necessarily about who’s winning or losing.
Lucy Kang: That was Jaime Longoria, manager of research and training for the Disinfo Defense League.
Salima Hamirani: I’m jumping in to remind you that you are listening to Making Contact. If you like today’s show and you want more information, or if you’d like to leave us a comment, visit us at our new website, focmedia.org. There you can access today’s show and all of our prior episodes. Okay, now back to the show.
Lucy Kang: Welcome back to Making Contact. I’m Lucy Kang.
Before the break, we heard from Jaime Longoria from the Disinfo Defense League about the ways that rhetoric on immigration is being weaponized for political gain. Immigration is a lightning rod every four years, but this time seems different. I wanted to get a sense of why that is and what it means for immigrant communities. So I spoke with Shiu-Ming Cheer, Deputy Director of Immigrant and Racial Justice at the California Immigrant Policy Center.
Shiu-Ming Cheer: I think this year, It’s gotten far worse in the sense of blaming and scapegoating immigrants for a variety of issues, whether that’s housing scarcity or economic scarcity. And it’s all just a way to distract from what’s really happening in terms of the real culprits behind economic insecurity, which tends to be the corporations and tax structures that benefit the very wealthy.
Lucy Kang: Trump has promised mass deportations if he’s elected.
Donald Trump: And we’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country. And we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora.
Lucy Kang: You know, I’m curious whether you have a take on why politicians, especially those on the right, are putting out such strong anti-immigrant messaging. Like, for example, when Trump is vowing to launch mass deportations, what is that really speaking to in the electorate?
Shiu-Ming Cheer: Yeah, I think that kind of a vow around mass deportations really speaks to people’s fears about a changing country. I think there’s a portion of the electorate that wants to maintain power and also wants to maintain an image of the U.S. that’s based on what it looked like in the 1950s, and that’s no longer the country we live in. A lot of people are afraid of any type of change, especially demographic change, and so I think Trump’s policies speak to that fear people have. Even if people don’t even live in areas where there’s a high number of immigrants, there is this concern that America is changing. And unfortunately for that grouping of folks, they don’t see it as a positive thing, which is, of course, is how I see it in terms of all the contributions that immigrants make and all the benefits that immigrants bring to the country.
I think instead, Trump is playing to people’s concerns and stereotypes about the unknown and the Other. And we’ve often seen that if somebody actually has an immigrant neighbor or a coworker, then this sort of boogeyman and fear is dispelled to a large extent because then people can see that immigrants are people like everybody else.
Lucy Kang: I wanted to, you know, just ask you, in your line of work, what are some of the biggest pieces of disinformation and misinformation around immigration that you’re seeing that you have to then debunk?
Shiu-Ming Cheer: I think definitely that immigrants are taking benefits and somehow not contributing. And that’s definitely false when you look at statistics around the amount of taxes that immigrants pay, whether it’s income tax or sales tax. If you look at the number of businesses that immigrants have begun and just the jobs that immigrants are in that really contribute to the economy, whether that’s high tech jobs or service sector jobs. Those are all like examples of the ways that immigrants have really benefited the country and really built up the country. But instead there’s this falsehood that immigrants are coming here and somehow not contributing or somehow getting things for free.
Lucy Kang: I don’t want to play into ideas that immigrants have to contribute economically to this country in order to prove their worth or have their human rights respected. But in the interest of setting the record straight, immigrants pay a lot in taxes: almost $400 billion federally and almost $200 billion to state and local taxes, according to Immigration Impact.
I have a few more examples of just the type of things that are being said that I would love to hear you correct the record on. So one that we’ve been hearing just again and again is how there’s an immigrant, quote unquote, “invasion” at our southern border. What would you say to that?
Shiu-Ming Cheer: I mean, I would say that historically there have been many waves of people coming to the US seeking safety seeking opportunities. That’s happening now to a large extent because of things that the U.S. government has been involved in, such as climate change, destabilization of other countries due to war and conflict. And so if we look at the root causes of migration and why people are coming, often those are triggered by the actions of the U.S. government and U.S. corporations. And it’s not true that we’re at a point where there’s more massive immigration than at other points in U.S. history. There’s been other waves of immigration for people from European countries. You know, there’s also xenophobic backlashes at those times.
Lucy Kang: A short list of the things that the United States government has done that forces people to leave their homes includes overthrowing the Guatemalan government, supporting death squads in Honduras and El Salvador, enacting neoliberal foreign policies that extract wealth from other countries, and instituting the deadly global War on Drugs. Not to mention releasing the highest share of emissions leading to climate change. You get the idea.
Shiu-Ming Cheer: And so, I think people just really need to understand that the desperation that migrants have nowadays that causes them to cross continents, multiple countries, to come to the U.S. and think about what it would take for somebody to be in that situation, to bring their children, often very young children or babies with them and to really make such a dangerous journey. It’s because people are completely desperate and have no way to survive in their home countries, again, because often because of the economic climate or military policies generated by the U.S.
Lucy Kang: Under Trump and Biden, the legal path to asylum has also been heavily restricted in what have been called “asylum bans.”
So I want to turn to this idea of asylum, which just to be clear is a human right and one that’s also protected by international law. How is the idea of asylum being twisted in some of the political rhetoric being used in the elections?
Shiu-Ming Cheer: Yeah, I think that idea of asylum has been twisted because often there’s not that understanding that you just said that this is rooted in human rights. It’s based on international and national laws around providing a haven for people who are seeking persecution.
And it’s actually a pretty high standard for somebody to be able to win asylum in the U.S. They have to show that they’re being persecuted because of specific factors and that they have objective evidence to support that fear of persecution. And it’s a pretty high bar, so it’s not as though asylum is something that is just routinely granted or is very easy to win without the help of a lawyer.
And so I think it’s been twisted into being almost a substitute or a proxy for the idea that somehow the border is open when it’s not. There’s still very lengthy processes people have to go through and lengthy appointments people have to wait for to even start the process of asylum.
Definitely racism is playing a part, and part of the racism is the fear of the Other, the fear of people who speak different languages or look different or might have a different face. And I think it’s easy to blame the other and to scapegoat people who look different or might sound different than the average white American for many of the real problems that do exist in this country, but were not created by people of color or immigrants.
Lucy Kang: And it’s worth noting that the system of immigrant detention we have can be very lucrative for private companies.
Shiu-Ming Cheer: I think the other factor that’s really driving this vilification of immigrants is the profit motive in the sense that there are companies that make money from transporting immigrants for deportation purposes that make money from creating different types of technologies that surveil immigrants and, make money from physically housing immigrants for deportation. So often, if you look behind the scenes at who’s driving anti-immigrant laws on the state level, typically there are corporations who have this vested interest in profiting off the misery of immigrants.
Lucy Kang: This country spends about $3 billion a year on detaining immigrants, often in horrible and inhumane centers run by private companies like CCA and Geo Group. Geo Group, one of the world’s largest private prison companies, then lobbies politicians to ensure the continuation of the immigrant detention system.
I asked Shiu-Ming what changes she would like to see in our immigration policy.
Shiu-Ming Cheer: I mean, I would start with, first of all, ending deportations. I think deportations are fundamentally unjust. Immigrants are treated differently than a U.S. citizen, in the sense that a U.S. citizen could go through the criminal system and then be released. But for an immigrant, they face a double punishment of deportation, and I think that just needs to end, as well as ending the practice of putting immigrants in detention centers while they’re waiting for their cases to be resolved. I mean, detention centers are basically prisons. They have abysmal conditions. They serve to make money for the corporations that are running them and they should just be shut down entirely. And, you know, on the flip side, there is a long overdue need to find a way for people who’ve been here to get their work permits and eventually be able to become citizens.
Lucy Kang: Okay, so by now, you’re probably wondering, what can we do about all this? I’m going to bring back our three experts to hear what lessons they have to offer.
So first, what steps can we as news consumers take to combat the spread of mis- and disinformation? Here’s Amber Boydstun from UC Davis, again.
Amber Boydstun: The first one probably is to fact check anything that seems suspicious. But the second one I would argue, and I say this very strongly to my students, even though it makes me sound old, is that you should get your news from a diverse set of sources. You should not rely on any single news outlet. And among that diverse array of sources, you should make sure that the dominant place where you’re getting your news are from those trusted news outlets that still do have those professionalism standards of journalism that are at least going to fact check the information.
We have a lot of agency in our choices. So we vote in terms of media consumption. We vote with our clicks, and our, you know, where we, where we turn our attention. We also can do our own job of spreading good information to our friends and family. Because we are trusted sources for our friends and family and we are more trusted sources probably than Fox News or MSNBC.
Lucy Kang: And when we do see dis- and misinformation, how can we fight back? The answer, from Disinfo Defense League’s Jaime Longoria, is a little more complicated and takes a good amount of work.
Jaime Longoria: You can’t just tell someone that they’re wrong and then leave it at that. You have to explain the processes and the steps as to, like, why what they believe isn’t correct and provide them with the correct information and an explanation as to why that information is correct. It’s a lot of heavy lifting. It’s a lot of work. You’ve essentially, like, created a doubt that now you need to fill.
So I think that’s why when we say fact checks are kind of not enough on their own, we really mean that it’s important to pair it with relationship, right? That’s the way that you can make a lot of these interventions more effective.
At its core, this is really about our digital civil rights, which we completely lack. And I think if we were able to have more ownership of our data online, if we had more control over how our data was used and how it was reproduced, stored and sold, these companies would find it a lot harder to keep track of us online and our existence online. I think we would deal with a very diminished amount of mis and disinformation compared to what we do now.
Lucy Kang: And finally, here’s what media makers can do to combat the lies and xenophobic rhetoric around immigrants, according to Shiu-Ming Cheer from the California Immigrant Policy Center.
Shiu-Ming Cheer: So I think the media could really uplift stories from immigrants themselves, which just helps to humanize the issue and show that migrants and immigrants are like everybody else. People who want to find a place where they can feel safety and feel that they can belong and just go about their daily lives.
Lucy Kang: And like the rest of you, I’ll be watching to see what happens on November 5th.
And that does it for today’s show. I’m Lucy Kang. Thanks for listening to Making Contact.
