Several United States senators demanded this Wednesday that Meta, controller of Facebook and Instagram, Twitter and Telegram that “moderate the false content spread” by RT in Spanish and Sputnik World.
“The disinformation campaigns in Spanish of the Russian media addressed to Latin American public and Caribbean reach the Spanish-speaking communities of the United States on a regular basis, directly harming our national interests,” assert three senators in letters addressed to the directors of these companies.
The issue of disinformation in Spanish worries the US government, which considers the amount of false news in this language to be alarming.
Democratic Senators Bob Menéndez and Tim Kaine and Republican Bill Cassidy assure that “Russian state media continue to exploit the platforms offered by Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and Telegram to spread and export their lies abroad”, especially since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine after being invaded by Russia.
The goal of this “disinformation campaign” is, according to them, “to spread falsehoods about (President Vladimir) Putin’s war in Ukraine, to polarize societies in the region, and to undermine democratic governance” in America.
The senators, who say they are “deeply concerned,” also call on these companies to devote more resources to identifying and “moderating the spread and amplification of disinformation content in Spanish” compared to fake news in English.
In an April letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, more than 20 congressmen complained about “misinformation in Spanish” on “Russian-owned” channels.
Months earlier, the United States Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) urged the executive directors of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and TikTok to solve this problem in social networks.
The digital giants claim that they act against disinformation by deleting user accounts.
