How TikTok accounts imitating Telemundo, others spread Spanish-language immigration misinformation
Nearly 40 Spanish-language TikTok accounts, several even posing as Telemundo and Univision, spread falsehoods and remained undetected for at least a month.
A rumor falsely claiming green card holders are banned from leaving and re-entering the U.S. spread like wildfire on TikTok this week, garnering more than 21 million views across dozens of videos shared by a network of nearly 40 accounts, many posing as Spanish-language news outlets to share immigration-related misinformation.
The accounts have been sharing doctored videos that contain artificial intelligence-generated content and the voices of well-known professional journalists to spread misinformation about immigration and other divisive topics that tend to go viral on social media, according to Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, Cornell University’s graduate campus in New York City.
Most of the TikTok accounts are named with generic terms that include the words "noticias" (news) or "noticiero" (newscast), and eight of them falsely use the logos of two major Spanish-language news networks, Univision and Telemundo. (Telemundo and NBC News are owned by NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast Corp.)
This newest Spanish-language disinformation network "hijacks both the kind of viral mechanics of the TikTok algorithm, plus the very human peer-to-peer nature of immigrant communities," Mantzarlis, who also runs Faked Up, a newsletter about digital disinformation, told NBC News.
Mantzarlis first started tracking the network of accounts last month after he saw a series of posts falsely claiming supermarkets would start requiring identification to buy groceries. In his newsletter, he said, some of the videos included messaging that pointed to "a clear effort to target undocumented immigrants."
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