Washington, D.C. – This past Saturday, United We Dream Action (UWDA) senior marketing and creative director, Juanita Monsalve, joined MSNBC’s The Cross Connection to discuss pervasive anti-immigrant and anti-Black disinformation campaigns and their effects on Latinx communities. UWDA recently teamed up with Harmony labs to analyze television and online consumption habits of Latinxs nationwide, specifically how they interact with stories of immigration and immigrants in the media, to create interventions against anti-immigrant disinformation narratives. During the interview, Juanita elaborated on the findings of the research, as well as on defense strategies everyday people can implement to fend off these targeted attacks.
To watch the full MSNBC interview, click here.
From Juanita:
“This research is particularly important because it tells us a lot about what we might see in 2022, and even more about what we might see in 2024. For us, it was really important to take a look at what type of anti-immigrant narrative is out there, how it is being weaponized against our communities and what they are consuming in this moment.”
“Part of what we discovered is that young Latinx women, 18 through 35, are consuming a wide variety of news and they are engaging with stories about immigrants. While for young Latinx men, again 18 through 35, what we found is that they’re a lot more insular, they’re in a virtual world and they aren’t consuming much media about immigration and immigrants. The reason why that’s important is because it presents a huge vacuum that very easily be weaponized and taken advantage of by bad actors. So we need to get out there and engage with them [young male Latinxs] if we want to see them engage with us in the 2022 election and much more in the 2024 election.”