¿El caso para el Complejo-Industrial-Censura?

The demand for “combatting climate misinformation” in Spanish.

An LA Times Op-Ed piece argues that Spanish-language “climate misinformation” spreads well… “like wildfire.”

How original.

“…It’s even more pervasive and less moderated in Spanish-language media,” the author of the opinion piece Edder Díaz-Martínez writes.

The typical bugaboos are mentioned to appease the LA Time’s typical audience too: Twitter, Trump, and “other famously prolific disseminators of English-language information.” Díaz-Martínez continues too writing, “the sources in Spanish are less predictable, more global and all but unchecked.”

Where does this porquieria (that’s Spanish for The Science™) come from?

A report published in part by the Boulder-based organization GreenLatinos, Graphika, and the infamous Friends of the Earth.

But first, GreenLatinos is worth a tangent of its own.

Because this is Titania McGrath level material.

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GreenLatinos’s slogan is (translated) “fighting for environmental liberation,” led by an “active comunidad de Latino/a/x leaders.”

The use of Latinx, which is hilariously inconsistently used in the Spanish version of their website, is of course something understood by the hundreds of millions of Spanish speakers worldwide from Tijuana to Ushuaia and from Madrid to Malabo. (sarcasm) In the US specifically, according to a Pew Research Center, just under 1/4th of those who identify as Latino have even heard of the word (clearly they’re not well-informed subscribers of the Noble Source of Truth LA Times) but a whopping 3% desire others use the term.

To add to their masterful use of la lengua de Cervantes, they used Google Translate to generate their parts of Spanish version of the website.

For a metaphorical cherry on top, they even have a petition on their website called “Taking back Cinco de Mayo from the commercial interests in the United States” which seeks to restore “the Historical Significance back to Cinco de Mayo, Commemorating the Ongoing Latino/a/x & Indigenous Battles to Defend our Land, Ocean, Air, Water, and Culture.“ The day, they argue, has been “disrespectfully ripped away from us by the corporate marketers who have shamefully branded Cinco de Mayo as ´Cinco de Drinko´ and ´Drinko de Mayo´ and erased its historical significance by marketing it as just a day to party.” This is almost as oppressive as those pesky right wingers losing their Bud Light! Since this is the United States, and everybody is forced to celebrate every holiday in one specially approved way, they need some #resistance.

To carry out this goal, they want (of course) signatures and statements from “Latino/a/x organizations, elected and appointed officials, and individuals,” in said statements they demand “an acknowledgment that it is time that we restore the true meaning of Cinco de Mayo by commemorating our ongoing battles to defend our land, ocean, air, water, and culture with an official day of action.  #TakeBackCinco.” These Noble Warriors have kindly provided a sample statement to use.

Lastly and most important is to support the Castner Range Campaign which asks President Biden to designate an area near El Paso, TX as a National Monument for the protection of Indigenous artifacts, recreational opportunities, water resources and climate change mitigation.

Somehow the day, which by the way isn’t even recognized by Mexico’s government as an official holiday is somehow the lynch pin for something far more than Mexico temporarily pushing the French army out of Puebla (not to be confused with the city close to Boulder called Pueblo) and instead revised as some knockoff Jose Martí “Nuestra América” call to solidarity for the millions of people across nearly 20 countries south of Gringolandia.

But this is all getting far off topic.

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Per Díaz-Martínez, the report, titled Los Eco-Ilógicos translating to the cleverly punned “The Eco Illogicals” and notably misspelled on GreenLatino’s English-language website, claims that the most of the “U.S. Spanish-language climate disinformation” comes from the damned colonists (our words) themselves - Spain.

He links to several recent Twitter posts - all pertaining to fires in the Asturias region of Spain - all too admittedly off the rocker to the point of causing a global aluminum shortage just to make the tin foil hat necessary to descramble them.

“Some weaponized the fires to spread political attacks against renewable energy and sustainable development, copying and pasting the same false content across multiple accounts,” he explains.

The Los Eco-Ilógicos report itself is just as alarming, writing in part, “Activity in the network responding to the fires began with climate deniers in Spain, who used the article to dismiss claims that extreme climate conditions make wildfires more common. Like-minded Spanish-speaking clusters of accounts across our network, including from the U.S., then amplified this narrative further.”

Note, fires plus climate change is more complicated than either of these groups are making it out to be.

The researchers in the report also categorized the sources of this misinformation into segments and mapped them too. Among the segments are Spain-based ESP Conservative Journos | Pundits | Catalan Independentists, and ESP Conservative | Libertarian | Vox Support with the latter being associated with the far-right Spanish political party Vox (not to be confused with the beacon of truth of the same name Vox.com based in the US).

The other groups are all based in the Americas consisting of “right-leaning, anti-communist, and libertarian accounts.” (as if the last two are bad things). Argentina, a country long ravaged by political parasites who make Gavin Newsom and the Caliifornia-PRI look somewhat competent, is home to La Derecha Diario (The Right’s Newspaper) who they discovered have spread misinformation not just across the land of tango but across all the other segments. Currently on the front page of said newspaper is an article discussing the current government’s desire to promote human consumption of insects. There’s no conspiracy with that one - the country’s Department of Agricultural equivalent is hosting an upcoming listening session next Monday.

A group specific to the US of course aligns with Evil Villains: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson, Sen. Ted Cruz, and the One America News Network (OANN) - all in English along with Epoch Times’s Spanish language version. Readers are reminded that the Epoch Times “has ties” to the Falun Gong movement and “outwardly opposes” the CCP which is easily the softest criticism we’ve seen on that particular publication. Their video content on websites such as YouTube “emulates traditional news broadcast programs” (well, no shit) and, ahem unlike GreenLatinos, they use native Spanish speakers.

An interesting note mentioned in both the op-ed piece and the report was reference to the New World Order conspiracy theories which was a few conspiracy theories ago to say the least, yet little to no attention to the World Economic Forum with the exception of a caption underneath a screenshot of a TikTok story where the user criticized the hypocrisy of climate change catastrophists using private jets to fly to the WEF’s annual meeting in Davos.

For those familiar with Spanish speaking social media users will be surprised to find out that the WhatsApp isn’t mentioned once in the report.

Sí tú sabes, tú sabes.

There’s of course a segment for COVID skeptics too. Readers are left wondering whether this includes the “the covid vaccine will give me 5G” with the “there are some side effects to the vaccine” and the “virus may have leaked from a lab” crowds.

A super fancy and scientifically accurate hockey stick graph is provided in the report showing the number of false posts per day from each segment during the majority of last July.

Mentioned too are some specific Twitter accounts including @valardedaoiz2 “apparently linked to” a “climate denialism author.” Alarmingly they also note that two other accounts @libertaddigital and @libre-mercado shared (gasp!) the same tweet at the same time of an article about Bjorn Lomborg who the report smears as a “prominent climate denier.“

Lomborg is nothing of the sort.

For the record - both of those accounts - as indicated in the bio for Libertad Digital are operated by the same entity so this incident is nothing particularly alarming. These disinformation commissars failed to even discuss what the article itself said. The formula followed here was simply icky Twitter users shared article with icky climate denier in the photo. The pigs in Animal Farm shouting two legs bad, four legs good are more insightful than this nonsense.

Back in the op-ed Díaz-Martínez informs us that out of all groups, apparently it’s Latinos and US-based Latinos more specifically, who are most disproportionally exposed to climate misinformation. Among the reasons are their apparently greater reliance on social media platforms but also “poor fact checking and moderation.” They too, he writes, are more likely to spread this misinformation and it’s not just climate misinformation but also public health misinformation and election misinformation.

Sprinkled between all this text in the op-ed are other links to similar LA Times climate crisis fetish including “Opinion: This rapidly spreading deadly fungus is a warning about climate change” and a nod to our state’s Dear Leader, “Opinion: If Gavin Newsom really wanted to go after Big Oil, here’s what he would do.”

Díaz-Martínez then narrows his scope to California and in particular that Latinos are more likely “to bear the brunt of the climate crises” and as an example states that most of the state’s farmworkers are Spanish speakers and that increasing temperatures are at greater risk of heat illnesses and death. Compared to who is left unanswered.

Writing, “Ninety-two percent of California’s farmworkers are Spanish speakers, for instance, and increasing temperatures put them particularly at risk of heat-related illness and death.” The actual connection between climate misinformation on social media and farmworkers is left for the reader to imagine too.

What is the solution to all of this aside from deputizing a woke commissar to speak for the interests millions of people?

Díaz-Martínez demands social media platforms be held accountable. To start, he insists that social media companies increase their content moderation staff, follow their own standards, and demonetize offenders regardless of language. Native speakers of said languages are to be used.

But that’s not all.

The government needs to get involved too.

Big Tech needs legislation to hold them accountable. He links to a Bill HR 6796 introduced last year by Rep. Lori Trahan, (D-Mass) with co sponsors Adam Schiff (D-CA), and Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill). The bill, had it been passed, would have created a new entity within the Federal Trade Commission entitled the Bureau of Digital Services Oversight and Safety. Tranhan in a statement quoted in Nextgov stated, “The Digital Services Oversight and Safety Act will be a shot of expertise in the arms of enforcers and legislators alike, helping to inform comprehensive and long overdue updates to the laws that govern the internet. Comprehensive transparency and product safety oversight are necessary complements to ongoing efforts to reform antitrust and data protection laws, and this new Bureau will be key to getting us there.”

Scrapping the regardless of language nuance, Díaz-Martínez demands that the social media companies produce detailed plans to reduce Spanish-based misinformation. He asserts, without evidence that these tech companies treat their Spanish users as second class citizens.

But wait, hasn’t the government, or governments, already taken roles in trying to manage misinformation? The “nothingburger” otherwise known as the Twitter Files revealed that several agencies in the US Federal Government, from the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, State Department, and both the Trump and Biden White House demanded social media companies do just such a thing. Coined as “the Censorship Industrial Complex” by

Public

, the level of coordination to supress the free speech of Americans, even if said free speech was misinformation is astonishing as is the partisan “defense” of it.

When exactly did Americans vote or endorse such things let alone those in other countries which have similar programs?

Jacob Siegel: "This isn't simply about censorship. They're trying to control reality."

On a different note, who exactly deputized Díaz-Martínez to speak for a group of people mainly united, in this case as he’s argued, by the language they speak?

This is typical narcissistic-driven patronizing authoritarian nonsense that creates the foundation of Woke ideology. The majority of Latin American countries plus Spain spent much of their collective histories living under authoritarian regimes -both right and left - where their people’s liberties were nearly non-existent and their lives micromanaged by arrogant state commissars. Top-down government censorship was strong back then and remains so today. Residents of many of these countries today continue to live in these same regimes sending thousands of their residents- mainly as refugees- to the oh so ever horrific and oppressive United States.

The fact Díaz-Martínez and the authors of the report itself made this highly politically charged in nature while ignoring the fact climate misinformation by definition also includes misconstruing every out of place weather event as an example of catastrophic climate change. That appears to be done more by left-leaning groups. Contrary to the cliché, reality does not have a liberal (left) bias. Truth is discovered through fair and honest discourse taking into account the viewpoints of all- something that’s genuinely fostering of diversity and inclusion.

People, whether they speak Spanish or not too, are also better at filtering fact from fiction than woke commissars give them credit for. They don’t necessarily need patronizing and pompous authoritarian fetishizing identitarian Commissars who hilariously do exactly the thing what they criticize.