Discrepancies remain in implementation of social media election information policies in English and Spanish in-platform searches
Rapid Research Note
By Nina Lutz, Adriana Lopez, and Danielle Lee Tomson
Key Takeaways
There are still significant differences in English and Spanish language search experiences for election information on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram.
There have been minor changes to interventions to Spanish language searches of “election fraud” on TikTok, but they vary from English language search features
Certain Facebook platform implementations for election fraud search queries in Spanish have rolled back.
In June, we published a post about Spanish language discrepancies on different social media platforms when searching for election fraud terms. We wanted to provide an update to this as voting has already begun in some states this election season. Our previous work found that, while platforms had policies in English and Spanish that were identical and did not specify differences between them, there were still key differences in their implementations. We speculated this may lead to further discrepancies throughout time as platform features are constantly changing and as the information environment itself changes as elections around the world occur, particularly in the U.S. and Latin America.
Policies
First, we reviewed each platform’s policies in September 2024 around election information in English and Spanish. We found that TikTok and Meta did not change policies in English or Spanish since our last post. We link previous policies, and current ones below.
TikTok
Search Policy: Searches for queries related to election misinformation will be redirected to authoritative sources, and informational banners will be shown.
Platform Guidelines Around Election Misinformation Pertaining to English and Spanish Languages:
Meta (Facebook and Instagram)
Search Policy: When searching for terms “related to the 2024 elections,” users will see official information about how to vote, powered by the Voting Information Center.
Platform Guidelines Around Election Misinformation Pertaining to English and Spanish Languages:
We searched these three platforms using queries related to election fraud in Spanish on devices set to English and devices set to Spanish – all geolocated in the United States. We report these results and compare them with previous ones below.
Implementation of Policies
TikTok
On TikTok we saw a newly implemented election integrity banner above the videos that are returned for the queries of fraude electoral Estados Unidos* and fraude electoral. This banner is unavailable on other relevant Spanish query terms. We have marked this behavior in the below table.
This banner differs from the English version of the same search (election fraud and election fraud United States), which does not return any search results, a pattern seen in other English queries as listed in our table below and in the screenshots below.
In Spanish the term fraude electoral USA, differed from all other Spanish queries. No results were returned for this search, and a warning notice about community guidelines is displayed, as seen in the screenshot below. This matches the behavior of the English search terms in the table.
Images 1-3: Search results for “fraude electoral USA” versus “fraude electoral” versus “election fraud”
Facebook
On Facebook, an intervention that was once there had disappeared. Previously, fraude electoral, yielded a Facebook elections information banner, but this is no longer the case.
Instagram
We conducted the same search on Instagram and did not notice any changes from our results in May.
Discussion
There could be many reasons for the changes in the implementation to the interventions in Spanish. Several elections occurred in Latin America in the past few months and election fraud has been an important subject of conversation. For example, the July 2024 Venezuelan presidential election had evidence of electoral fraud, resulting in handing leadership back to incumbent Nicolas Maduro. Diasporic Venezuelans and other Spanish-speakers may be particularly interested in searching for these topics on social media platforms to join these conversations.
Moving forward, however, Spanish-language searches within the United States may be more likely to yield information about the U.S. elections than previous ones in Latin America. Platforms and the public should be mindful of the disparity between interventions in Spanish and English about election fraud. Reliable Spanish-language news coverage is declining. Research shows that Latinos who use Spanish-language social media are more exposed to misinformation. As such, interventions to provide reliable Spanish-language election information will become increasingly important in this election cycle.
For those who want to learn more about misinformation in Hispanic communities in the United States, we recommend the following resources from organizations in this space:
Nina Lutz is a University of Washington Center for an Informed Public graduate research assistant and doctoral student in the UW Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering.
Adriana Lopez is a CIP undergraduate research assistant.
Danielle Lee Tomson is the CIP’s research manager.