At the beginning of 2021, Catalina Jaramillo had just started working as a staff writer at FactCheck.org, investigating and correcting misleading information about COVID-19 in Spanish. Immigrant communities were facing a tidal wave of inaccurate claims about the coronavirus, a lot of it on social media.

At the time she began her new job, the COVID-19 vaccine was already available, and Jaramillo was doubtful there would be much misleading information to correct. Relaying her thoughts in an interview on A Better Life? podcast about the impact of COVID-19 on immigrants, Jaramillo said, “The worst happened already.” She added, “I felt like [2020] was the big misinformation spread. I was so wrong.”

Misleading information about COVID-19 comes in many forms. One of the most common is what Jaramillo refers to as misinformation. This is false information spread without awareness of it being untrue. “A typical example would be your tio, your uncle, sending you something on WhatsApp about COVID vaccines without knowing that [it’s] false or incorrect, just because they just want to share it with you because they love you,” Jaramillo says.

Now, Jaramillo realizes that “misinformation, unfortunately, is here to stay,” and worse, “it keeps coming.” She likens it to a “game of whack-a-mole. You kick one, it comes from another place.” This year alone, there’s been misinformation on the safety of vaccines and cases of people self-medicating with dangerous and inappropriate drugs, such as ivermectin, an anti-parasite drug for animals.

“Immigrants are particularly vulnerable to online misinformation,” Jaramillo adds. “They don’t trust a lot of people, so they’re in a lonely place. And that’s when predators can be more effective, because you don’t have someone to ask, or you could not read the media because you don’t understand the language.”

According to a recent Nielsen report, Latinos in particular spend more time on almost all social media platforms compared with the general population, but the content filtering used by these platforms is insufficient to correct the wave of misinformation aimed at immigrant communities and non-English speakers. According to a study from Avaaz last year, Facebook only detected 30% of misinformation in Spanish—compared with 70% in English.

Immigrants are also frequent users of messaging platforms like WhatsApp, which allows them to stay connected with family and friends no matter where they are. But WhatsApp has also been used to circulate messages riddled with false information. “These messages are inherently tied to the community,” says Nicolás Ríos, an audience editor at Documented who has reported on the impact of misinformation on immigrant communities in New York.

Read the full article about COVID-19 misinformation by Katelynn Laws at YES! Magazine.