How a TikTok network spreading Spanish-language immigration misinformation gained traction

Yahoo

27-03-2025

A rumor falsely claiming green card holders are banned from leaving and re-entering the U.S. spread like wildfire on TikTok this week, garnering more than 21 million views across dozens of videos shared by a network of nearly 40 accounts, many posing as Spanish-language news outlets to share immigration-related misinformation.
The accounts have been sharing doctored videos that contain artificial intelligence-generated content and the voices of well-known professional journalists to spread misinformation about immigration and other divisive topics that tend to go viral on social media, according to Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, Cornell University's graduate campus in New York City.
Most of the TikTok accounts are named with generic terms that include the words "noticias" (news) or "noticiero" (newscast), and eight of them falsely use the logos of two major Spanish-language news networks, Univision and Telemundo. (Telemundo and NBC News are owned by NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast Corp.)
This newest Spanish-language disinformation network "hijacks both the kind of viral mechanics of the TikTok algorithm, plus the very human peer-to-peer nature of immigrant communities," Mantzarlis, who also runs Faked Up, a newsletter about digital disinformation, told NBC News.
Mantzarlis first started tracking the network of accounts last month after he saw a series of posts falsely claiming supermarkets would start requiring identification to buy groceries. In his newsletter, he said, some of the videos included messaging that pointed to "a clear effort to target undocumented immigrants."
He noticed the accounts mainly focused on posting about President Donald Trump and immigration.
This week, at least 25 videos shared by the network of TikTok accounts spreading false information about green card holders impersonated the voice of Univision reporter Javier Díaz. Díaz did not respond to a request for comment and Univision did not comment.
The 25 videos were deleted from TikTok after NBC News sent links for the videos when requesting comment from the social media platform on Tuesday. NBC News also sent the company links for the 38 TikTok accounts Mantzarlis found were part of the network.
By Wednesday afternoon, all 38 TikTok accounts were taken down.
In a statement to NBC News, a TikTok spokesperson said, "We continue to protect our Spanish-speaking community from misleading content and accounts by investing in moderation teams and technologies, partnering with fact-checkers, and building media literacy tips and tools."
According to the spokesperson, TikTok took down the videos and accounts because they violated the company's integrity and authenticity policies that prohibit harmful misinformation, misleading AI-generated content, impersonation and deceptive behaviors.
A false narrative shared by one of the accounts in the network last month used the voice of former Telemundo anchor María Celeste Arrarás to make it look like she was reporting on Trump considering a plan to provide a legal pathway for undocumented immigrants without a criminal record.
Arrarás posted the clip on her Instagram account to let her followers know the news in the video "IS FAKE."
"They've edited several reports I presented on television years ago to mislead the public. IT'S AN AUDIO CUT to make it seem like I'm reporting news that ISN'T REAL. Please spread the word," she wrote in Spanish.
As of Tuesday, that video featuring Arrarás' voice appeared to have already been deleted from the TikTok account. But the account remained functional until Wednesday morning along with several other videos containing misinformation, including a new one published the day before using Arrarás' voice.
Before TikTok shut down the accounts Wednesday afternoon, the videos that included misinformation about green card holders and legal pathways for undocumented immigrants had reached the feed of an immigrant woman in New York City whom Amelia Scdoris, a community organizer at Cabrini Immigrant Services, had been helping.
It's an example, Scdoris said, of why her organization holds regular meetings to help immigrants parse through misinformation they encounter and serve as a trustworthy source of immigration-related information.
According to the TikTok spokesperson, the platform relies on automated technology, user reports, proactive searches, trend reports from experts and fact-checkers to detect misinformation on the platform across different languages. During the third quarter of 2024, over 97% of the content taken down from TikTok for violating its integrity and authenticity policies "was removed proactively before someone reported it to us."
They added that TikTok has thousands of content moderators monitoring misinformation globally but declined to say exactly how many.
As an example, TikTok's operation in the European Union region had 531 Spanish-language content moderators and 1,524 English-language content moderators as of December 2024, according to the company's most recent digital transparency report that it's required to file to operate in that region.
Despite these efforts, combating online misinformation remains a daunting task. Latinos, including Spanish-speaking immigrant communities, are more likely to rely on social media to stay informed than other groups, according to a Nielsen report. TikTok is particularly popular among Latino communities in the U.S., with roughly half of Hispanic adults reporting they use the platform.
Luba Cortés, the civil rights and lead immigration organizer at the advocacy group Make the Road New York, said she's seen firsthand how the news consumption habits of Spanish-speaking immigrant communities make them more vulnerable to the kind of misinformation spread on social media.
"They see it and they believe that it's true," Cortés told NBC News about the AI-generated content and misinformation people are seeing online. "That causes a lot of mass panic."
What's more, she said, the panic motivates viewers to share the false videos within their networks, since they mistakenly think the TikToks contain helpful information.
Immigration-related falsehoods shared online often gain more traction when they include 'misleading cuts of evidence' connected to 'a real crisis,' according to Mert Bayar, who researches rumors about immigrants and noncitizens as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public.
That seems to be the case with the storyline falsely claiming green card holders, or lawful permanent residents, can't leave and re-enter the U.S. It's been circulating after news stories about green card holders now fighting deportation after participating in pro-Palestinian campus protests and traveling abroad.
Last week, the National Korean American Service and Education Consortium, an immigration advocacy group, said in an Instagram post that some green card holders have unknowingly signed an I-407 form relinquishing their lawful permanent status.
Cortés said she has not come across a case like that in her organization, but 'I do think, now, there are concerns.'
Because the network of TikTok accounts sharing videos with false information both "denounce Trump's immigration policy and others that say he's about to save everyone," Mantzarlis said it's unclear if the operation is politically motivated or if it's laying the foundation to identify potential victims for future financial scams.
As part of his previous research, Mantzarlis has seen how users who interact with this kind of content later become targets for monetary scams.
"The only thing we can say for certain is that they're just trying to build a public, build a large audience," he said. "Afterwards, what they choose to do with that is kind of up to them."
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com