Discrepancies remain in implementation of social media election information policies in English and Spanish in-platform searches

Sep 26, 2024 | 2024 Rapid Research Blog, Rapid Research Blog, Research

A collage of screengrabs of TikTok searches in English and Spanish.

2024 U.S. ELECTIONS RAPID RESEARCH BLOG

This is part of an ongoing series of rapid research blog posts and rapid research analysis about the 2024 U.S. elections from the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public. It is crossposted on the CIP’s election rumor research Substack newsletter.

By Nina Lutz, Adriana Lopez, and Danielle Lee Tomson
Center for an Informed Public
University of Washington

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 in Table 1. 

Table 1: Search and intervention policies for election information by platform as of September 24, 2024

Platform Search Policies Platform Guidelines Around Election Misinformation Pertaining to English and Spanish Languages
TikTok Searches for queries related to election misinformation will be redirected to authoritative sources, and informational banners will be shown.
Meta (Instagram and Facebook) When searching for terms “related to the 2024 elections,” users will see official information about how to vote, powered by the Voting Information Center. 

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.

Table 2: Intervention results on TikTok

Term May 2024 September 2024 Difference?
Election Fraud ✅No content available – redirected to community guidelines hub. ✅No content available – redirected to community guidelines hub. No
Fraude electoral ❌Content available – no labels or warnings ✅Content available but with new banner with clarification (see above screenshot) YES
Election stolen ❌No content available – redirected to community guidelines hub. ❌No content available – redirected to community guidelines hub. No
Elecciones robadas ❌Content available – no labels or warnings ❌Content available – no labels or warnings No
Rigged election ✅No content available – redirected to community guidelines hub. ✅No content available – redirected to community guidelines hub. No
Elección amañada ❌Content available – no labels or warnings ❌Content available – no labels or warnings No
Election Fraud US ✅No content available – redirected to community guidelines hub. ✅No content available – redirected to community guidelines hub. No
fraude electoral Estados Unidos* ❌Content available – no labels or warnings ✅Content available but with new banner with clarification (see above screenshot) YES
fraude electoral USA ❌Content available – no labels or warnings ✅No content available – redirected to community guidelines hub. YES

*  After discussing this term with our community partner, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, we also looked it up with “EEUU,” “America,” and “América.” We also tried “USA” given recent trends we had seen. USA was the only variation we saw an intervention on TikTok. All other platforms did not vary across variations. 

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. 

Table 3: Intervention results on Facebook 

Term May 2024 September 2024 Difference?
Election Fraud ✅Content has warning banner and directions to Voting information center. ✅Content has warning banner and directions to Voting information center. No
Fraude electoral ✅Content has warning banner and directions to Voting information center. ❌Content available wtih no intervention or banner YES
Election stolen ✅Content has warning banner and directions to Voting information center. ✅Content has warning banner and directions to Voting information center. No
Elecciones robadas ❌Content available with no intervention or banner ❌Content available with no intervention or banner No
Rigged election ✅Content has warning banner and directions to Voting information center. ✅Content has warning banner and directions to Voting information center. No
Elección amañada ❌Content available with no intervention or banner ❌Content available with no intervention or banner No
US Election Fraud ❌Content available with no intervention or banner ❌Content available with no intervention or banner No
fraude electoral Estados Unidos* ❌Content available with no intervention or banner ❌Content available with no intervention or banner No

* After discussing this term with our community partner, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, we also looked it up with “EEUU,” “America,” and “América.” We also tried “USA” given recent trends we had seen. There were no variations in implementations on Facebook.

Instagram

We conducted the same search on Instagram and did not notice any changes from our results in May.

Table 4: Intervention results on Instagram

Term May 2024 September 2024 Difference?
Election Fraud ✅Content has warning banner and directions to Voting information center. ✅Content has warning banner and directions to Voting information center. No 
Fraude electoral ❌Content available with no intervention or banner ❌Content available with no intervention or banner No
Election stolen ✅Content has warning banner and directions to Voting information center. ✅Content has warning banner and directions to Voting information center. No
Elecciones robadas ❌Content available with no intervention or banner ❌Content available with no intervention or banner No
Rigged election ✅Content has warning banner and directions to Voting information center. ✅Content has warning banner and directions to Voting information center. No
Elección amañada ❌Content available with no intervention or banner ❌Content available with no intervention or banner No
US Election Fraud ❌Content available with no intervention or banner ❌Content available with no intervention or banner No
fraude electoral Estados Unidos* ❌ Content available with no intervention or banner ❌Content available with no intervention or banner No

*  After discussing this term with our community partner, the National Hispanic Media Coalition, we also looked it up with “EEUU,” “America,” and “América.” We also tried “USA” given recent trends we had seen. There were no variations in implementations on Instagram

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.