Project in Florida uses community messengers to connect immigrants with credible info
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
As news outlets disappear and conspiracy theories go viral, researchers are exploring new ways to get credible information to the people who need it most. One project in Florida is using community messengers to connect immigrants with the facts they're looking for. Here's NPR's Jude Joffe-Block.
JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK, BYLINE: Late last year, Scarlett Lanzas (ph) was hanging out with neighbors at the community pool at their housing development in Miami. That's when she heard one woman say something that was definitely not true.
SCARLETT LANZAS: Hey, did you guys hear that the elections - the presidential elections are not going to happen in 2024? And I was like, what? I was like, where do you get that from?
JOFFE-BLOCK: Lanzas told her neighbor the election was still on. The actual conversation happened in Spanish. Lanzas was born in Nicaragua. Her neighbors are mostly from Latin America and the Caribbean.
LANZAS: Many of the immigrants that flee their countries is because maybe they come from regimes that actually can, you know, cancel elections. So that's where factual information is so important.
JOFFE-BLOCK: As it turned out, Lanzas had been preparing for this exact scenario, how to spread factual information. She was chosen to be a bilingual information navigator as part of a pilot project designed by researchers at Brown University. Lanzas' role was to pass on what she was hearing in the community to the research team. The team would send back factual posts over the messaging app WhatsApp that could be easily shared. That day, Lanzas told her neighbor...
LANZAS: Listen, I'm going to report this this week so that next week, I'm going to show you the right information.
JOFFE-BLOCK: Brown University's Information Futures Lab figured out that the rumor had originated with a video on social media, in which an Alexa device seems to say the 2024 election will not take place. It was popularized by Alex Jones, who has a history of spreading conspiracy theories, and then was translated into Spanish. Here's Stefanie Friedhoff, who led the research team.
STEFANIE FRIEDHOFF: Spanish-speaking communities were already being targeted with campaigns to try to prevent them from voting, basically. We created both text and video-based and other assets to help people understand that, yes, absolutely, the 2024 election is happening.
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UNIDENTIFIED NARRATOR: (Speaking Spanish).
JOFFE-BLOCK: The video explains in Spanish the election is happening November 5, and to be aware of rumors circulating to confuse people. Scarlett Lanzas forwarded the information onto her neighbor over WhatsApp, which Friedhoff says is exactly how the project was designed to work.
FRIEDHOFF: We know that people trust information more when it comes from sources or from cultural contexts that they already know.
JOFFE-BLOCK: Evelyn Perez-Verdia helped run the pilot from Miami and recruited Lanzas and the 24 other bilingual information navigators.
EVELYN PEREZ-VERDIA: Like a hairstylist, the manager of a construction group, just people that were ordinary people in the communities and are, honestly, a circle of trust in their communities.
JOFFE-BLOCK: Perez-Verdia says there were surprises in the questions that came back.
PEREZ-VERDIA: We realized that it wasn't just about the mis- and disinformation affecting our communities.
JOFFE-BLOCK: Less than 20% of the questions were about rumors. Instead, people were asking about Florida's immigration law that took effect last year and how much their landlord could raise the rent, questions that were hard to find answers for, especially in Spanish.
PEREZ-VERDIA: They didn't understand how government worked. They didn't understand where to get a mammogram.
JOFFE-BLOCK: Friedhoff says the pilot revealed that some immigrant communities are dealing with huge unmet information needs. To meet those needs, Friedhoff wants to find a way to expand the use of information navigators. For NPR News, I'm Jude Joffe-Block.
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