The Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) members decided to act against the production and distribution of targeted false political information, which unequally affects Latino or Hispanic voters who live in the United States.

Online platforms such as YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Telegram are the most active channels for the circulation of this news and, in the context of an election year, there is a fear that the great spread of fake news will impact the elections in the country even more. Another worrying factor of misinformation is the production of false information about the Covid-19 pandemic and vaccination.

On January 14 of this year, 22 of the 38 members of the “Caucus” signed and sent letters to the CEOs of Meta (formerly Facebook), YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok requesting a meeting to discuss the bilingual dissemination of fake news (Spanish and English) on their platforms.

The letter sent to Mark Zuckerberg called attention to the urgency of discussing the spread of false information by Facebook, according to Latino Rebels publication.

The four CEOs of the platforms that were targeted by the Caucus (Zuckerberg from Meta, Shou Zi Chew from TikTok, Parag Agrawal from Twitter, and Susan Wojcicki from YouTube) confirmed they received the letter, although no meeting has yet been scheduled, according to the same publication.

Congressman Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) told the publication that “we need to hold the social media companies accountable and bring them in and do it in a way that we can actually deliver some change”.

False information disseminated by Meta and YouTube platforms is more tolerated when produced in Spanish, according to Joaquin Castro (D-TX), who posted on Twitter about the problem.

Deputy Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) told the publication that technology CEOs are aware: “They make a profit from it. Hopefully, we can bring them here, but meanwhile, they should just look at their own data and know that they are playing a big part in the misinformation happening”.

Referring to the studies that confirmed Donald Trump won the support of voters in Florida and Texas in the last presidential elections, due to fake news in Spanish, congressman Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) warned this situation can happen again this year if any concrete measures are not taken.