By Cathy Ching
Medill Reports
Social justice leader Mary Gonzales fought for environmental justice in Pilsen for years. Breaking down the language barrier in climate-related issues for the Latino-dominated community is one of the biggest challenges of all, she said.
“Most websites dealing with things that are important to us are not in Spanish. Secondly, if they are in Spanish, it’s so technical,” said Gonzales, who fought against the operation of Sims Metal Management in the neighborhood, a scrap metal shredder with a history of EPA violations. “I have trouble reading stuff about the environment online. I just give it up … And so if I don’t understand it in English, how the hell are people going to understand it in Spanish?”
To fight for climate literacy in Latino and Hispanic communities, the Gas Leaks Project, a nonprofit focused on exposing the dangers of the fossil-fuel industry, launched a four-week-long digital educational campaign Feb. 3 in Chicago and New York City.
Available in English and Spanish, the campaign uses several techniques to combat misleading information on social media and streaming services including videos, a landing page and graphics resembling the traditional Mexican game Lotería.
Formed in 2022 by a coalition of communications professionals, the Gas Leaks Project aims to raise awareness on misleading information and guide the public toward a new way to look out for accurate educational content, Executive Director James Hadgis said. The campaign tackles both climate disinformation, which is deliberately intended to mislead, and misinformation, which is simply inaccurate information.
As Meta prepares to end its agreements with third-party fact-checking organizations in March, Spanish-speaking groups in Chicago will continue to be disproportionately impacted by misleading health and climate campaigns online, according to a January article from POLITICO.
More than 1 in 5 Hispanic Americans prefer social media to other platforms for news, according to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center. (Graphic by Cathy Ching / MEDILL)
“Roughly 1 in 5 of (Latino and Hispanic Americans) like to get their news from social media, and they’re more likely to prefer that than any demographic group interviewed,” said Javi Garcia, a communications manager of the Gas Leaks Project, referring to a Pew Research Center poll from last year. “As Latinos are the largest consumers of Spanish content in the United States, Spanish content is actually less scrutinized by social platforms.”
The nonprofit highlighted five techniques in its educational campaign that perpetrators typically use: fake climate experts, illogical conclusions, impossible high standards of climate science, conspiracy theories and cherry-picking information.
Hadgis’ team chose Chicago as one of its two campaign sites because the city ranks No. 5 with the largest Latino and Hispanic population nationwide. In Spanish-speaking families, misinformation can spread like “wildfire” because of close communication through tight-knit group chats, said Juan Pablo Alvarado, a climate misinformation and disinformation program coordinator at GreenLatinos, a national nonprofit partner with the Gas Leaks Project for the campaign.
“From extreme weather to pollution, our communities are being impacted by this, yet they are often excluded from the decision-making process,” Alvarado said. “Disinformation really does undermine our community’s ability to advocate for their health, their safety, their environment and just makes it harder to achieve any true environmental justice.”
Chicago also became a prime Gas Leaks Projects campaign site because of recent escalating tensions with disinformation campaigns, Hadgis said.
For example, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s administration sued five of the world’s largest oil and gas companies last year — including BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and Shell — and trade group American Petroleum for “deceiving Chicago consumers about the climate dangers associated with their products,” according to the city’s news release.
Additionally, the Chicago Chronicle, a now-defunct fake news outlet, spread misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines in the city. In October, the Washington Post reviewed documents obtained by a European intelligence service and found the creator of the fake news outlet was working for the Russian military’s intelligence service.
Offline, activists such as Gonzales are also helping to spread the message of environmental issues in their communities, striving to prevent further health impacts in the city — especially in areas lacking resources in their native languages.
“I don’t want people to run away,” Gonzales said, “I just want them to know and say, ‘Now, what battle can we take on?’”
Cathy Ching is a health, environment and science journalism graduate student at Medill. You can follow her on Twitter at @bycathyching.
