By Jeremy B. Merrill and Ryan McCarthy - Propublica
In Florida, where President Donald Trump won crucial support from Latino voters, his campaign posted a propaganda video in Spanish on YouTube with the false claim that Venezuela's ruling elite supported Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
YouTube played the video more than 100,000 times in Florida in the nine days leading up to the election, even after The Associated Press news agency published an information check that debunked the Trump campaign claim.
In reality, the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, had expressed his opposition to both candidates.
The video was part of a broader Trump campaign strategy in heavily Latino South Florida that sought to link Biden with socialist leaders such as Maduro and the late Cuban President Fidel Castro.
Trump won in Florida by about 375,000 votes, obtaining the largest margin in a presidential election in that state since 1988. He won about 55% of the Cuban-American vote, according to exit polls.
"Latinos living here in the United States have fled socialist or communist regimes," said Diego Scharifker, a Venezuelan-American lawyer, former Caracas city councilor and co-founder of the group Venezolanos Con Biden.
“Of course, there is great repercussion or fear or scars because of communism among the Latino community in the United States.
Trump, with his false accusations and false information, was sowing fear and playing with pain to further his agenda, "he added.
The video illustrates the loopholes in YouTube's owner Google's handling of misinformation.
Although Google theoretically prohibits all kinds of false statements in advertising placed on its platform, it rarely removes political ads.
Additionally, deficiencies in its transparency tools make it difficult for supervisors and fact-checkers to examine advertisements.
Screenshot of the video ad with false accusations posted in Florida by the Trump campaign.
Ronny Rojas / Telemundo News
The rules governing Google's political ads "try to take both sides" when it comes to verification of information, said Bridget Barrett, a political communication researcher at the University of North Carolina.
"Actually, basically anything goes," he added.
Google considers that statements such as the one referring to Maduro are "within the public sphere, for which they should be challenged by the Biden campaign or verified by journalists," he concluded.
YouTube approves ads by reviewing both people and machines.
Its policies prohibit any advertiser from making “a false statement, be it a statement about the price of a chair or a statement that voting can be done by text message, or that Election Day has been postponed, or that a candidate has died".
Charlotte Smith, a company spokeswoman, informed ProPublica in an email: "We do not make any special exceptions for politicians."
However, YouTube only removes a "very limited" number of political ads that make "claims that are proven to be false and that could significantly undermine confidence in democratic or electoral processes," he said.
The Trump campaign ad "does not violate that criterion," he said. "This video does not violate our policies," he said, "political ads are known to be hyperbolic and we will not attempt to judge every claim or reply."
[Trump accuses Biden of being a socialist opposed to religion. These are the reasons why it is completely false]
Other platforms are somewhat more restrictive.
While Facebook doesn't verify the information posted in political campaign ads, it did ban new ones in the week before the election.
(Trump's ad does not appear to have been posted to Facebook, based on its ad repository. If it was, the ban may not have been applied to it because it began streaming on YouTube on October 26, eight days before the November 3 election).
Facebook's fact-checking partners do review postings by political action committees and other third-party groups, some of which are removed.
Twitter banned all political propaganda.
Although television stations cannot select candidate ads based on content, cable TV networks can and sometimes reject ads.
Trump's ad did not appear on television, according to Advertising Analytics, an ad tracking company.
The Trump campaign considered YouTube key to its strategy, according to a report by news website Politico in September, and ran more than 18,000 video ads on YouTube this year.
The campaign spent $ 106 million, including $ 37.2 million in the final month of the election campaign, on the Google platform, both on YouTube ads and Google search ads.
The questionable video begins by describing Biden as "the candidate of Chavismo," referring to the type of socialism associated with Hugo Chávez, the late leader of Venezuela, and the Maduro government.
It then shows Diosdado Cabello, an ally of Maduro and Venezuela's second most powerful politician, saying on his television show that the “Bolivarian breeze” of Latin American socialism “is blowing, blowing, blowing, blowing.” “Let's see what pass.
Maybe the Bolivarian breeze will reach the United States.
In how much time?
In 13 days until the elections. "He adds.
The term “Bolivarian” is an allusion to Simón Bolívar, the 19th century revolutionary claimed as the inspiration for many Latin American socialist movements.
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Then the text on the screen reiterates that “the Chavistas” - members of the political party that controls Venezuela - “want Joe Biden to win.” The video concludes with a statement that the ad was paid for by the Trump campaign, with the voice of Trump saying he approves of the message.
There is little doubt that the relationship between the Trump administration and Maduro is strained.
Trump has imposed sanctions on Venezuela, as well as on Maduro and Cabello directly.
The US government accused Maduro and Cabello of narco-terrorism and drug trafficking in March.
Venezuelan state television has taken a tone “completely against Trump,” said Daniel Acosta-Ramos, a researcher at First Draft, a nonprofit that tracks disinformation and is also an Electionland contributor.
However, Maduro said at the end of September that he did not care who was elected: “If Trump wins the elections we will face him and we will defeat him;
And if Biden wins, we will also face him and defeat him. "
The AP's verification of a video that resembles that of the Trump campaign announcement concluded that neither Biden nor Maduro "have declared that there is any kind of affinity between them or between their national projects."
In the television segment from which Cabello's comment about the "Bolivarian breeze" was extrapolated, there is no explicit mention of Trump, Biden, the Democratic party or the Republican.
Although the comment could be interpreted as a wish for Biden to be elected and promote the agenda of the progressive wing of his party, Cabello has a reputation for being a provocateur and purposely saying things that are unclear, according to Acosta-Ramos.
"That ambiguity creates an environment conducive to misinformation," he said.
The ad, Acosta-Ramos said, was “specifically directed at people who know what the Bolivarian breeze means.
Not only Venezuelans, but also Cubans and Colombians. "
Other YouTube ads from the Trump campaign reinforced the false message.
These show images of Maduro referring to Biden as “Comrade Biden” in a 2015 speech. Although it was only a passing reference and Maduro indicted Biden shortly after conspiring to overthrow him, Donald Trump Jr. presented it as proof that Biden had weakness. for socialism.
The official bilingual Trump campaign Twitter account also claimed that the Maduro regime supported Biden.
A tweet from Trump called Biden a “CASTRO-CHAVISTAS PUPPET.” Trump's Facebook ads branded Biden a “socialist” and photographed him with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, who refer themselves as democratic socialists.
"There was a concerted effort by the Trump campaign and its allies to misrepresent Joe Biden and his values because they knew they couldn't win with Trump's disastrous record," a Biden campaign official told ProPublica.
Trump supporters walked the streets of Little Havana in Miami on Oct. 31, 2020.Rebecca Blackwell / AP
Florida's Venezuelan population has grown to about 200,000 people, of which about 50,000 are registered to vote.
In Doral, a Miami-Dade County city that is home to many Americans of Venezuelan, Cuban, and Colombian descent, Trump captured about 49% of voters in 2020, up from 29% in 2016. Across Miami-Dade, Trump it garnered nearly 200,000 more votes than in 2016, reducing Democrats' voting margin from 29% to 7%.
[These are the immigration promises of Joe Biden, the new president-elect]
The Trump campaign, the White House and the Venezuelan embassy did not respond to requests for comment.
Trump's ad may not have been detected during the campaign due to shortcomings in Google's political ads report, established by the company in 2018 to improve transparency.
Unlike Facebook's archive of political ads, Google's does not group identical ads when, for example, they are published in different periods of time.
Google's transparency tools showed three different copies of the “Bolivarian breeze” ad, yielding separate data for each. Google also does not offer a search function for video ads, nor does it allow bulk download of ad content.
That kind of layout doesn't allow opponents, journalists or watchdogs to meaningfully analyze the 263,000 political video ads (and another 361,000 ads) that Google sold in 2020, Barrett said.
“You get drowned in content and get overwhelmed by these individual ads, and many of them are actually the same;
you're stuck trying to navigate this overwhelming sea of ads, "Barrett said," ads can disappear into the depths of the ad repository. "
Google has said that it only allows advertisers to target political ads based on the location, age and gender of users, and that it discloses these targeting options on its website's transparency page.
All three copies of the “Bolivarian breeze” ad were targeted by location to target Florida users.
Although Google's transparency tools don't disclose it, YouTube ads can also be targeted by language, for example, to target Spanish speakers, Smith said.
It's unclear how much the Trump campaign spent on the ad and how many times it ran.
Google data shows that the Trump campaign spent between $ 1,000 and $ 5,000 on one of the ad copies;
between 100 and 1,000 dollars in another copy;
and less than 100 in the third.
Two of the copies were reproduced less than 10,000 times, and the third was reproduced between 100,000 and 1 million times.
Facebook publishes more accurate information.
Trump supporters amplified the campaign's message, pretending to connect Biden and other Democrats with “Castro-Chavismo,” a term that links Venezuelan and Cuban socialism. Fake posts on social media, of unknown origin, were intended to show Jill Biden, Biden's wife, standing next to Fidel Castro, actually Jacqueline Beer, the wife of a Norwegian explorer.
"We saw a large number of WhatsApp messages shared by Venezuelan and Cuban groups, saying that the governments of these countries that we escaped from, [wanted] Biden, so we should vote for Trump," Acosta-Ramos said.
What one member of Biden's team described as a barrage of misinformation put the Democrat's campaign on the defensive.
It mounted its own fact-checking effort to repel claims about Biden and socialism.
It invested heavily in outreach to Florida's Latinos, including media ad space purchases that reached six figures in the past two weeks, targeting the Latino community, a team member said.
At a rally in early October in Miami, Biden said: "Maduro, whom I met in person, is simply a dictator and is causing enormous suffering to the Venezuelan people."
Telemundo's Ronny Rojas, Derek Willis and Ivette Leyva
contributed to this report.
Translation by
Candice Carmel,
edition by
Ivette Leyva.
