Media watchdogs say misinformation, and disinformation, remain a chronic problem on Spanish-language radio in Latino communities like Miami's — and monitoring it can be as laborious as it is necessary.
But Latino broadcasting reform advocates say a new, AI-driven app could make that audio vigilance easier and more effective.
The tool is called VERDAD, or “Truth” in Spanish. Using artificial intelligence, it identifies and translates Spanish- and other foreign-language radio misinformation into English.
The app is the brainchild of Martina Guzman, an independent journalist at the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne State University’s law school in Detroit.
With a grant and help from AI developers in California, Guzman, a Mexican-American who has spent much of her career covering the Latino community, launched VERDAD online late last year.
“VERDAD allows you to be able to examine the trafficking in disinformation flooding the Latino community — where the disinformation is coming from, and who is spreading it,” Guzman told WLRN.
The app lets users select languages, radio stations, states, types of misinformation — from voting to vaccines — as well as positions on the political spectrum, since misinformation flows from both the right (whose hardline anti-communist agenda tends to dominate Miami radio content) and the left.
Random searches on VERDAD often bring up several instances of Miami stations broadcasting questionable if not outright false content. They include debunked conspiracy theories ranging from warnings that the anti-COVID drug Remdesivir is deadly to claims that former First Lady Jill Biden ran the cabinet meetings during former President Biden's administration.
Guzman said VERDAD has found that kind of health and political misinformation is an especially acute problem on Spanish-language radio.
"We're talking about information that affects the well-being of Latino children, or the role Latinos play in our democracy," Guzman noted.
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Guzman said the VERDAD app could also allow journalists, researchers and regular listeners to detect when stations are broadcasting false information directly from foreign state-run agencies like Sputnik in Russia — which she argues have made the Latino community a vulnerable target.
“It isn’t just disinformation we're dealing with," she said.
"We are encountering campaigns from governments like Russia, China, who have social media troll farms — and it’s being picked up by [radio] hosts across Latino communities in the United States.”
Real time
Tracking radio misinformation can be time-consuming in any language. Independent nonprofits like Factchequeado play an important watchdog role in the Spanish-language arena.
But many Latino media observers told WLRN it’s especially welcome to have an app like VERDAD to ferret out untruthful broadcasting — especially since Latinos still rely on radio more than other communities.
"La radio is a very important part of Latino life and culture," said Evelyn Perez-Verdia, who heads the communications consulting firm We Are Más in Fort Lauderdale and is a prominent Latino media monitor in South Florida.
"And this app is really important because it's in real time, it's all in one place," added Perez-Verdia, who was recently a visiting fellow at Brown University researching the information needs of Latinos. "And we can [use it to] create collaborations that involve not only radio but YouTube and other platforms, to more truthfully inform the Latino community."
Joshua Scacco, a professor of political communication at the University of South Florida in Tampa, said VERDAD can be "a very helpful tool for teaching and research," particularly on what he and other experts call "content fraud" in the Spanish-speaking community.
Scacco, who also directs USF's Center for Sustainable Democracy, added that he hopes the app will raise pressure on Spanish-language broadcasters to rein in the misinformation, by raising awareness among listeners and advertisers to a degree conventional radio monitoring perhaps hasn't in the past.
"The bottom line for these stations is audience and sponsors," Scacco said, "and this app could make more of them consider whether they want to be associated with this kind of content."
Guzman says she’s still refining the VERDAD app’s A.I. process, especially in terms of site navigation. But she feels it will help the Latino community, and the media that cover it, look at those issues more responsibly.
"It's like a rear-view mirror," she said. "It covers your blind spot."
