MIAMI — Like his favorite American politician, Alexander Otaola unsuccessfully contested the election results when he lost his bid to become mayor of Miami-Dade County this summer.

The Cuban-born Otaola, a star in the right-wing Spanish-language media world, hosts a daily YouTube program, “Ota-Ola!,” in which he dabbles in election denial, denounces communism and Democrats, and touts the many virtues of Donald Trump.

On a recent afternoon in his bright-yellow home studio on a heavily guarded four-acre farm south of Miami, Otaola, 45, peppered his conversation with unsupported claims: He said Kamala Harris would rule as a Marxist. He described an online video he says showed Georgia ballot drop boxes being tampered with during the 2020 election. And he told of communist agents he says are trying to intimidate his show’s sponsors.

The anticommunist message he delivers Monday through Friday on YouTube includes fears of an authoritarian takeover that aims to control your every personal freedom — if Trump loses in November. “The left,” he says, “only brings misery, exodus and political prisoners.”

Otaola is emblematic of the siloed, highly political Spanish-language media environment in South Florida that operates largely outside regulatory and other scrutiny, and where misinformation targeting Latinos flourishes.

Latinos are the largest minority group in the United States, with 19 percent of the population — the fastest-growing segment of the American electorate. They stand to play a crucial role in the coming election for president and control of Congress, particularly in key states such as Florida, Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Pennsylvania and Georgia. The rapid growth of the demographic grants them a near mythical status for both political parties. In the last days of their campaigns, both Harris and Trump have doubled down on events courting them.

But Latinos face misinformation from political actors at home and abroad. Specific storylines can resonate differently depending on a person’s cultural background. Certain social media habits place Latinos who consume at least some of their news in Spanish, regardless of national origin, in an especially difficult position when confronting efforts to mislead. Importantly, a lie in English-language media is likely to be corrected more quickly than one in Spanish-language media, simply based on the resources dedicated to such efforts in the United States, experts say. And while there is a renewed effort among civic and political groups to solve the issue as this demographic group grows in number and electoral influence, Spanish-language lies tend to survive longer than those in English — and require culturally appropriate solutions to be countered effectively.

‘Do not trust government’

Donatella Ungredda, who lives in Miami and participated in a program there to help stop the spread of disinformation, explained the problem as she sees it. Originally from Venezuela, Ungredda has a word of caution for fact-checkers communicating with Latinos about falsehoods: Do not debunk the rumor and appear to side with a government entity too quickly, because it can appear untrustworthy to someone who may have fled a corruptly governed country. “It is in our DNA,” she said of Latin Americans. “Do not trust government. Because they are lying to you.”

Apart from baked-in cultural beliefs, misinformation directed at Latinos is also an issue of preferred media diet. New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics found that Latinos in the United States — both bilingual and mostly Spanish-speaking — consult YouTube for political news far more than non-Hispanic White people do. They are also more likely to consume political stories on nontraditional channels not affiliated with brand-name media outlets. Many Latinos keep in touch with one another, including friends and family in other countries, on encrypted platforms such as WhatsApp, which lack fact-checking functions. Fifty-four percent of Hispanic adults use WhatsApp, compared with 31 percent of Black adults and 20 percent of White adults, according to a recent study from Pew Research.

The U.S. Latino community varies widely based on country of origin, political affiliation and geography. Nearly 60 percent of Latinos are from Mexico, according to a 2022 Pew Research Survey, followed by those from El Salvador, Cuba and the Dominican Republic at just under 4 percent each. Puerto Ricans, who were the object of a racist joke told by a comedian at Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York on Sunday, make up 9 percent of the Latino population in the continental United States. Latinos identify as a range of ethnicities, including Afro-Latino, Asian Latino and White. While Democrats have always won the majority of the Latino vote, a boost of support for Trump in the 2020 election has given Republicans hope for a much-dreamed-of nationwide Latino voting boom that they haven’t achieved since George W. Bush won 40 percent of this demographic.

Much of the latest activity in Spanish-language media has been on the right. Fox News recently launched a Spanish-language service, as did the Gateway Pundit, a conspiracy-theory-peddling website. Both Fox and the Gateway Pundit settled defamation suits related to false claims they spread about the 2020 presidential election.

“Latinos are deeply underserved, and especially Spanish-dominant Latinos who consume news and information in Spanish,” said Stephanie Valencia, co-founder of the Latino Media Network and Equis Research, a research and polling operation focused on Latino voters. Part of what makes Latinos so alluring to political parties is what would make them good consumers of quality media, she said.

“The plurality of Latinos are actually kind of in the middle and are trying to decide whether their vote matters, because I think both parties have really fallen short in both not just reaching and engaging, but also delivering for the community,” said Valencia, who previously worked for the Obama administration,

The solution to bad information, experts say, is better, more culturally sensitive media organizations serving Latinos. “Spanish-language media in a lot of markets is a Wild West no man’s land with virtually no oversight and zero FCC monitoring. So basically, anything goes,” said Fernand Amandi, managing partner of Bendixen & Amandi, a multilingual polling and consulting firm specializing in the Latino electorate.

Valencia herself spearheaded a recent attempt to bring what she says is more quality media to Hispanic communities. In 2022, she and a business partner bought Latino Media Network, which is made up of 17 radio stations, and secured funding from a foundation backed by liberal philanthropist George Soros. The deal spurred Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and allies to urge the Federal Communications Commission to scrutinize the deal for fear that the new owners would stifle the conservative bent of some of the stations, namely one of the most popular radio stations in Miami, an anticommunist, conservative operation called Radio Mambí. Democrats blamed Radio Mambí for spreading falsehoods that cost them votes in 2020 — such as repeating Trump campaign claims that Joe Biden would turn the United States into a socialist state — and fanning conspiratorial doubts about who won that election. (Valencia said she has no desire to impose a political view on the stations.)

In that environment, political campaigns try to press their case. A recent campaign from Elon Musk’s America PAC, which is supporting Trump, targeted Latino voters in swing states, with digital ads calling the vice president Comrade Kamala and depicting her in a manipulated image wearing the costume of a Soviet soldier in front of a hammer and sickle flag, according to an analysis from the Spanish-language fact-checking group Factchequeado.

The conservative strategy of linking communist messaging to a Democrat isn’t new. A 2020 ad from Latinos for Trump took advantage of the negative connotation of the adjective “progressive” in Latin America. It spliced a video of Biden saying he was going to go down as one of the most progressive presidents in American history with images of self-proclaimed “progresistas” of autocratic regimes such as Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro.

When Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president, the volume of such campaigns accelerated and targeted Latinos with narratives that would resonate, according to Laura Zommer, founder of Factchequeado. She added that manipulated and misleading messages don’t just originate from domestic political actors: recent Spanish-language campaigns depicting Democrats paying migrants to cross the border had all the hallmarks of Russian propaganda.

The capital of Spanish-language media

Miami is the unofficial capital of Spanish-language media, with influence that spreads far beyond South Florida. Nearly 40 years ago, Univision launched a Spanish-language news service to provide Latinos with a reliable source to compete with the Big Three broadcast news operations: NBC, ABC and CBS. The network had a threefold purpose: to inform Hispanics about major news events, to educate the community “in the customs and mores of this country and the responsibility you have as citizens,” and also to “defend the rights of Hispanics,” according to Joaquin Blaya, former president of Univision.

Since then, the area has changed dramatically and so has the media scene. As Amandi put it, “Miami is a right-wing laboratory for all of this stuff, which, you know, they kind of beta test everything here — if they see it’s working, then it’s exported to other Hispanic markets in the country.”

Juan Camilo Gómez, host of the popular “A Primera Hora” program on “Actualidad” radio, which has been on the air for decades, has seen this too. He and his cohosts started to notice “crazy” calls from listeners after Trump came into office. So they launched a short fact-checking segment to try to inform their listeners, but soon they learned how difficult it was to correct a lie.

“If you tell a lie in English, it’s very probable that it’s going to be corrected,” Camilo Gómez said. “In Spanish, it is not the same story. The same lie with the same title with the same image, it’s not going to be corrected in Spanish as much as in English.”

He personally notices misinformation several times a week on his family’s WhatsApp channel, where he tries to correct false information but often finds it fruitless.

“One of the big things we are dealing with is that lies don’t go away.” Or more specifically, “the lie is going to be louder than the correction.”

Trump had been confronted by one of his own falsehoods at a Univision Town Hall in Miami on Oct. 16. Asked by José Saralegui, a registered Republican, if he really believed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating the pets of other residents, Trump responded that he was just repeating what had been reported. (Saralegui said in a brief interview with The Washington Post that he is voting for Harris.) Another questioner pressed Trump on his inaction on Jan. 6, 2021, and Trump responded by calling the moment “a day of love.” The camera panning the audience showed quizzical expressions on several faces.

Fighting the falsehoods

Concerted efforts to fight misinformation targeting Hispanics are taking hold. Late last year, Latinos who participated in a pilot program organized by Brown University and a local nonprofit dedicated to fighting disinformation reported hearing false rumors that the 2024 election was canceled in the United States, said Evelyn Perez-Verdia, who runs We Are Más, a Miami-based advertising and communications group focused on democracy causes and fighting disinformation.

One woman who participated in the program to help correct falsehoods circulating in her community was Ungredda. She described encountering other Venezuelan immigrants who believed the conspiracy theory around Smartmatic, the voting machine company that was swept up in a relentlessly promoted conspiracy theory around the 2020 election. Trump allies such as Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani falsely claimed that another voting machine company, Dominion Voting Systems, was owned by Smartmatic and that Smartmatic was formed, according to Giuliani, “to fix elections” by Venezuelans who were close to former Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez. That conspiracy theory took hold in English-language media and resulted in multiple defamation suits against those who spread it. But it had particular resonance for Venezuelans.

“So once you take small pieces of truth,” Ungredda said, “you elaborate it, you arrange them, and then throw it again to people, and then there is a small base of truth. But just that.”

And yet sometimes there is no truth at all. Ungredda also heard a rumor that the 2024 election in the United States was going to be canceled. “Here, it didn’t stick,” she said. “In Venezuela, I heard, ‘Yes the election will be canceled and everyone will be arrested.’” That message, too, resonated more broadly among Venezuelans, Ungredda said, because of the country’s history with election irregularities under Maduro.

In Little Havana, Rafael Palacios, a Cuban engineer who moved to the United States for his studies, said Trump’s support among Latinos may come from “the strongman complex” that many Latinos have, meaning that they can be drawn to the archetypal autocratic leader.

“Kamala is perceived as a socialist, which I don’t know why, but she’s perceived as a socialist,” Palacios said. “You hear all the time anything out of the Republican talking heads . . . Comrade Kamala . . . Socialist. . . . if you’re not with Trump, you’re a socialist. And you know Trump is Putin’s buddy. But that’s okay. That doesn’t make him a socialist,” remarked Palacios wryly. “And the Democrats are the ones that are fighting Putin, helping Ukraine. . . . the Democrats have been stronger with the Ukraine aid than the Republicans have. But the Dems are still the socialists. I really don’t understand.”

The message of Harris’s leftist leanings is repeated regularly on Alexander Otaola’s show. Otaola came to the United States from Cuba after the dean of his high school told Otaola that as a gay man, he was not welcome in the country. Otaola said he then knew he had to leave Cuba, which he managed to do when he was 24 years old as part of a visa lottery program.

When he first arrived in the United States, Otaola worked at a Walmart and eventually made his way into media. He was a registered Democrat until 2018, he says, when Jill Biden traveled to Cuba. Turned off by her friendly visit to what he considered a brutal regime, Otaola said, he decided to switch parties and throw his support behind Trump. He has never looked back. When espousing his views of the irregularities in the 2020 election, Otaola couldn’t quite remember where he saw the video of drop boxes being tampered with in Georgia. Pressed for his source, he thought for a moment. “Maybe,” he said with a laugh, “it wasn’t Georgia. Maybe it was Arizona.”

previous coverage

• US officials expect foreign meddling to last past Election Day