At 10 years old, Etel Calles’ life changed forever. Calles, originally from El Salvador, left her country due to a brutal 12-year civil war.
“In 1986 the church put me on a school bus, to avoid being recruited to fight in the war,” she recalled. Calles left her home, family and friends as an unaccompanied minor. She’s part of the roughly 1 million Salvadorans who fled the country as result of the Salvadoran Civil War.
Calles arrived in the U.S. and settled in Los Angeles with relatives after crossing three international borders by herself as a child. She relocated to the Bay Area in the 1990s to study at San Francisco State University. Today Calles is the community outreach coordinator at El Timpano, a nonprofit news organization based in Oakland, that serves Spanish and Mam (Mayan language)-speaking communities in the Bay Area. Calles’ experience led her to this work.
“I know that feeling of being lost and alone, that feeling of not knowing,” she said.
Calles leads El Timpano’s disinformation workshops. The workshops began during the Covid pandemic in 2021, intending to teach participants to identify misinformation and stop it from spreading in the Spanish-speaking community.
“I’ll set up wherever there’s a safe place, at la pulga (flea market), the laundromat, at the school,” Calles said.
According to El Timpano, by 2023 their workshop helped around 100 East Bay community members identify misinformation. And their “ongoing text-messaging platform of news, information and participatory reporting,” has helped inform thousands of Spanish-speaking immigrants.
Calles said the demand for disinformation workshops has gone up since President Trump’s inauguration. The UCLA Center for Health and Policy Research found a correlation between anti-immigrant rhetoric, strict immigration policy and declining mental health of immigrants regardless of immigration status. The number of immigrant adults with Serious Psychological Stress Disorder rose 50% during Trump’s first presidency.
Learning is deeply social. Most of the information we hold as true we learned from people we trust such as family, friends and teachers, according to an article written by Cailin O’Connor and James Weathebal for Issues in Science and Technology. Social media sites allow users to create online communities of people who trust each other due to personal connections or similar interests.
Disinformation campaigns take advantage of trusted community members by targeting them with content meant to provoke an emotional response and prompt them to share the content across their social network. Because the content is shared and reposted by known or trusted people, malicious content can spread widely through Hispanic communities. El Timpano combats disinformation at the root by educating trusted community members. Participants learn why disinformation is created, how to identify it and the consequences of not stopping it.
On a recent early Tuesday morning, Calles brought the disinformation workshop to a family resource center in Hayward.
Sandra and Emily, childcare workers for the resource center, were the first people in the classroom. Sandra shared some of her clients’ fears of being randomly detained by ICE. “A lot of people are afraid,” she said. “I have clients who tell me they’re afraid to get their eyeglasses. Some ask me if it’s safe to go to Costco or Target.”
The Trump administration has promised to conduct the largest mass deportation effort in American history. During his first two weeks in office President Trump signed 10 executive orders aimed at deterring immigration and empowering ICE to deport undocumented immigrants.
Calles wore all black with a shirt displaying El Timpano’s logo. All three women who participated sat in the front row as Calles stood in front of a projector. The title of the presentation read, “Defensa Contra la Infodemia (Defense Against the Infodemic).”
A brief game of “Telephone” demonstrated how quickly information can change through dissemination. Calles whispered a Spanish rhyme, “La perrita, derrita me irrita (the dog, melts irritates me)” to the first person to the left. The person repeated it to the person next to them until it got to the end of the table. When the last person said the phrase out loud, everyone started laughing.
“That’s funny,” Calles said, “but what about when the information is about an ICE raid? Then it’s not so funny.” She conducts the entire presentation in Spanish, through a series of slides and pictures demonstrating malicious content and “red flags” to spot.
There’s a difference between disinformation and misinformation. “Disinformation is false information presented as truth, created with the intention of deceiving,” Calles said. While misinformation is false information which is shared with friends and family online without knowing or having ill intent.
Calles explained the varying reasons why people create disinformation. “The economy of the internet is motivated by clickbait,” she said. According to the disinformation workshop, content which is widely shared or goes viral is financially profitable for the creator or site which produces it.
Calles displayed a fake article posted online indicating President Trump signed a new law allowing Ecuadorian nationals to come to the U.S. without a visa. “Look, it doesn’t even have an author,” Calles said. She uses this to teach participants to analyze content before consuming it. “If you’ve never heard of the website and there is no author, it is most likely false information,” she said.
Calles moved on to financial scams on the internet. “How many of us wouldn’t want a cheap three-bedroom apartment or a job that pays to stay home?” During the disinformation workshop’s first year, El Timpano found consumer fraud was the most common issue encountered online by community members. A series of fake job postings, property rentals and financial schemes were shown.
“If it sounds too good to be true then it’s probably not real,” she said.
Social motivation was the next topic on the list. “Who remembers this photo of the pope?” Calle asked. She displayed a viral meme depicting Pope Francis in an all-white parka puffer jacket and an “iced out” cross of Christ. According to Calles, people make malicious content to gain followers, make jokes or for fun. Yet these images and videos can be misinterpreted as the truth and spread through communities like wildfire if people are not careful.
The last motive Calles explored involved political incentives. “This could be to create division [or] chaos, breed hate or deter people from voting,” she said. A study by Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review found that in 2022 waves of Spanish-language misinformation campaigns were deployed to influence the Hispanic vote. The study also found that disinformation campaigns specifically target minority groups and that most educational campaigns are designed for white English speakers.
The presentation switched gears to teach participants how to use their newfound knowledge when encountering polarizing immigration content online. As Calles displayed pictures of white vans and what appeared to be ICE agents, she asked, “Has anyone come across any of these?”
In one of the photos a small child is seen screaming and crying as he’s being forced into the back of a van. After a moment of silence Emily explained how the picture caused panic in her Oakland community.
Calles then dissected online posts claiming to show ICE activity. “Look at this one with the letters all capitalized,” she said. The post claimed ICE checkpoints were being conducted in Hayward.
“Whenever you encounter an alarming post that has an urgent message, you have to be careful,” she said. The posts are meant to trigger an emotional reaction of fear which moves people to share the posts to their social network. People believe that by sharing a post with alarming content they are helping, but in reality they could be spreading false information, potentially leading to panic.
Calles explained how ICE activities work. “La migra (ICE) doesn’t just randomly pick people up. They have to have a warrant with a name, and it must be signed by a judge,” she said. False ICE activity rumors in San Francisco caused fear to rise and prompted a response from Mayor Daniel Lurie in an attempt to calm the panic. The rumor, started by a middle school student, was not only widely spread online. Local news outlets also covered the story.
Calles then introduced El Timpano’s text-message-based platform. “Our service operates day and night,” she said. People who witness alleged ICE activity are encouraged to send pictures or videos to the message system, at which point El Timpano will verify if the ICE activity is valid. Once it’s been verified El Timpano will send an alert to all subscribers alerting them of the location where ICE is operating.
Throughout the Bay Area Rapid Response Networks have been started by local organizations to verify ICE activity and inform immigrant communities. “It’s important to follow local organizations that provide free resources,” Calles said. Local organizations’ presence and knowledge in communities makes them trusted sources of information that provide news relevant to the Spanish-speaking community.
At the end of the presentation Calles provided time for participants to reflect on the workshop and share what they learned. One by one the three participants responded.
“I won’t just send any posts to my family,” said Sandra.
