New study on how Latinos engage online — ‘people are tired of fighting’

Ed Note: A recent study by the Digital Democracy Institute of the Americas (DDIA) examines how Latinos engage with online content. What sticks, which messages get through, which don’t, and why. The study, conducted in partnership with Factchequeado and based on qualitative forums and in-depth interviews with Latinos across the U.S., offers a window onto how the second largest demographic group in the country consumes digital content. “We want to understand specifically how communities are engaging with information ecosystems, what are the driving forces behind that engagement, and how that translates to engagement and trust in democracy,” says DDIA Founder and Executive Director Roberta Braga. She spoke with ACoM Editor Peter Schurmann.

Your report begins with a data point that caught my attention, which is that the average American checks their mobile device 160 times a day. Is that true?

Yes. We are always connected online. One of the questions we asked the participants in the study was to describe to us what their regular routine looks like in the morning and what are they checking first. And almost everyone mentioned the first thing they do when they open their eyes is look at the weather app on their phone, reply to messages from friends and family, then the passive scrolling, usually on TikTok and Instagram. And they also tend to end their day with that passive scrolling, too. So, it was nice to see there is a pattern, that we are all sharing in the same information tendencies and ecosystems.

That’s interesting, because the conversation around social media has often been about the fragmentation of information sources. But you’re pointing to a unifying trend of sorts.

I still think we are fragmented in what we are choosing to consume, the spaces where we go. But the platforms we visit and the things we appreciate seeing seem to have some correlation.

What was the most surprising finding from the research?

For as long as I have worked on online harms and misinformation, I always thought distrust was key to the problems that lead to online harm. I still think that is true, and people, or Latinos at least, are not trusting a lot of what they see online 100% of the time. But what shocked me was that I don’t know that trust is even a factor in some instances of content consumption. For example, I don’t know that trust matters as much as we think it does, at least when it comes to passive scrolling… it sounds like what people are craving, what they are valuing and what they are paying attention to has more to do with escapism, entertainment.

What is passive scrolling versus active search?  

Passive scrolling is sort of the default, when we are not seeking something out specifically, the place where you go to spend time, that is how I define passive scrolling. It’s the default way we are engaging with information these days, we’re going through whatever pops up on TikTok and Instagram until we find something that peaks our interest, then we might dig into it. And I think passive scrolling is the default way that we encounter things.

A lot of what people see while passive scrolling is determined by a platform’s algorithms. Do these work differently in Spanish, say, then in English?

I don’t know the algorithms in that way. But I suspect it’s not fundamentally different across languages, that the algorithms still reward very sensationalistic content, that specific formats are probably amplified, that the degree of volume a creator posts pushes the algorithm to amplify some of their content. For Latinos, who usually consume content in multiple languages, Spanish, English, Portuguese in some cases, they get pushed to see content in both English and Spanish pretty frequently.

You mentioned trust earlier. How much do Latinos trust traditional news sources versus content creators or influencers, for example?

People want to have something to believe in, they want credible information when they are searching for something specific. And in that, people did say that they trust organizational accounts and that they trust news. Even if they noted big outlets might have a bias or an agenda, they still go to them, because they know the content will be verified, more serious and well researched. People raised names of individual outlets. Spanish language outlets came up, but so did local outlets and local journalists. For example, one person originally from Venezuela brought up Venezuelan journalist Carla Angola. Trust cues were also important. Organizations that had been around a long time, names people recognized, they are more trusting. The degree of engagement with the news outlet is also important. Does an outlet have a large following, are the comments diverse in their perspectives, that was a cue for them that the content is serious. We did one study in 2022 where we tested messenger personas. There was a local journalist, an activist, and the friend next door. And the local journalist was the person who moved Latinos the most away from misinformation, even when people noted they didn’t think the journalist was very likable or trustworthy. So there is something about the institution of journalism that is still important to people.

You note that trust cues matter. Can you give a few more examples of what that looks like?

People noted for us how much they value geographic proximity to the messengers they engage with. That was huge. And also cultural proximity. They wanted their messengers to feel like they had information from the ground near them. They wanted people to have shared lived experiences, not just to physically be nearby, but perhaps to be an immigrant as well, or to be able to signal they have gone through something in life similar to theirs. Things like this are super important.

Californians are about to vote on Prop 50, which has to do with redistricting, a topic that until now at least has been among the hardest to engage communities around. What would be an effective way to get that message across?

What people told us is that they want to find that kind of information if they feel like it connects to their day to day lived experiences. In the case of Prop 50, I don’t think it’s the case that people don’t care about redistricting. I think it’s that they don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how it will impact their day to day lives. Latinos in the US care deeply about family, community and working to become better human beings. Another thing we learned is that people want agency. They find information useful when it empowers them to do something with it. You need to land those connections.

The Trump Administration has increasingly targeted individual immigrants for online speech. How do you think that might affect discourse online among Latinos?

One thing we heard from participants in the study is that sometimes they do self-censor. They didn’t use that word, but they said they sometimes hesitate to post their opinions on social media because they are afraid of push back, or of losing friends and family, or people getting angry at them. So they don’t always make their opinions known, or they won’t weigh in if there is a debate happening. Some said they will if they feel pressure… one guy said he eventually weighed in on the Israel-Palestine conflict because he felt like he needed to take a stand after being silent. But I think people are not necessarily actively connecting the fear of being attacked by the Trump Administration. They are very anxious about partisan polarization and what that means for their inner circles and connections. People are tired of fighting.

Finally, how should we see this research in light of our current political moment?

Social media amplifies perception gaps. Just as distrust is a big deal online, the reality is that people think they are more divided than they are. They are seeing a lot of sensationalistic and harmful things, and they think that is representative of the majority. Whereas I think actually there is a silent majority that is more moderate than the internet suggests. That we have more in common than not but we are having a hard time finding that common ground because the worst of the worst is pushed online… the loudest voices win out and everyone else pulls back.