Disinformation about Russia's invasion of Ukraine is surging in Spanish, as stories crafted for a Latin American audience gets a boost from the Kremlin.
FILE - Destroyed Russian armored vehicles sit on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, March 31, 2022. Disinformation about Russia's invasion of Ukraine is surging in Spanish, as content crafted for a Latin American audience gets a boost from the Kremlin. , the Kremlin’s version relentlessly warns social media users across Latin America that the U.S. is the bigger problem.
Though many of the claims have been discredited, they’re spreading widely in Latin America and helping to make Kremlin-controlled outlets some of the top Spanish-language sources for information about the war. Russian outlet RT en Español is now the third most shared site on Twitter for Spanish-language information about Russia's invasion.
Yet the content thrives on Spanish-language websites, message boards and social media pages. While Russia also creates propaganda in languages including English, Arabic, French and German, it’s found particular success with Spanish-speaking users, according to recent research by Esteban Ponce de Leon, a Bogota, Colombia-based analyst with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, a Washington think tank that receives funding from the U.S. and other governments.
'There’s different avenues where RT is actively engaging communities across Latin America and the United States,” said Jacobo Licona, a researcher at the Democratic firm, Equis Labs. “That’s part of the reason RT has been so effective, they’ve been building this network or community ahead of time.” RT’s Spanish language service began in 2009, four years after its English language version. It has rapidly gained ground, and is now far more popular than its English counterpart. RT en Español has more than 16 million followers on its Facebook page, nearly triple the number of its English site.
On Twitter, RT and Sputnik get help from Russian diplomats and a network of other accounts that researchers say artificially boost the popularity of the posts. That has helped RT become the third-most shared site for Spanish-language information on the Ukraine war on Twitter, outperforming local news sources as well as international outlets like the BBC and CNN.
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