Beneath the Prop 1 win, misinformation

The Sunday before Election Day, a rally in Jackson Heights combining calls for public safety and opposition to the legalization of sex work revealed a crowd with a laundry list of concerns. Over 100 neighbors, politicians, and clergy shouted in Spanish: 

“Roosevelt has been lost to drugs!”

“[The media] are sellouts!”

“Out with corruption!” 

They were demanding the extra police recently assigned to Roosevelt Avenue stay longer than the 90 days the city said the public safety initiative would last. This so-called “Operation Restore Roosevelt” had been promoted as a response to community concerns around crime, brothels, and unlicensed food vendors in the area.

But within their demands was a stream of misinformation. There were occasional claims of local election fraud: some said Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez had cheated to secure her electoral win. There’s no evidence of this. 

And frequent refrains around Proposition 1 centered on one fear: that their cisgender kids would one day come home from school a different gender. While Prop 1 passed last week, the spread of false claims like this provides insight into a larger story about misinformation.

 “We are grateful to the voters who overwhelmingly rejected misinformation,” said the executive director of the NEW Pride Agenda, an LGBTQIA+ advocacy group, in a statement. While Epicenter NYC has reported on it frequently, misinformation in local politics continues to fly under the radar as we look toward another election next year.

Attendees at the Jackson Heights rally spoke out about quality-of-life issues. People hurled insults at elected officials who had given them “a dose of socialism.” Dozens of immigrants repeated previously debunked claims about newer immigrants contributing to a supposed rise in crime — a narrative that helped raise pro-Trump sentiment among some NYC immigrants this election. 

While the rally was advertised as focusing on public safety, some of the speeches and side conversations morphed into a discussion about preventing minors from being able to get gender-affirming surgeries without their parents’ consent. 

One speaker shared his belief that parents have little authority at school: He recounted that staff denied his request to administer a pill when his then 17-year-old son was sick at school. 

“For that you have to take them to a pediatrician and the parent has to be present, am I right?” he said in Spanish. “But they want to give kids a right to [change their gender] and I can’t tell my son ‘no’ or they’ll throw me in jail.” 

The crowd let out cries of indignation. 

When I asked some attendees why they believed Prop 1 would take away this parental right, they repeated that it could do this. They said they learned this from their faith leaders and community leaders, including some with ties to pro-Trump groups. 

According to the nonpartisan NY Bar Association, Prop 1 won’t impact parental rights — that’s already covered by other established state and federal laws. It won’t change any of the current rules on parental consent or parents’ role in healthcare decisions for their kids, including decisions around gender-affirming care.

Not just in Jackson Heights

The claim that expanding civil rights would allow their kids to become trans at school wasn’t just running rampant at the rally, or in this neighborhood, or among certain immigrants. 

Last month, at an event hosted at a Catholic church in Richmond Hill, one volunteer, a Mexican immigrant, was overheard urging her friend, in Spanish, to vote because “he says he will ban transgender operations on Day One,” she said. “The teachers, they’re telling their kids to dress as a boy one day, dress as a girl another day, to see how they like it. They’re going to take our kids.” 

In addition, as far back as April, press releases from the Coalition to Protect Kids urged parents to oppose Prop 1 for this same reason. It called the proposal the “parent replacement act.” They claimed it could allow minors to undergo gender-related medical interventions without parental consent, and give schools more authority than parents over minors’ gender transitions. They also claimed it would enable biological males to compete in girls’ sports.

Why this misinformation spreads so easily

It’s not surprising to misinformation experts that politicians and media outlets — especially those on the right — have focused campaigns and ballot measures like Prop 1 on culture wars. These are most likely to induce fear and anger in potential voters, says Yotam Ophir, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo specializing in media, misinformation, and extremism.  

“Misinformation prevails in polarized societies and at times of social anxiety and uncertainty,” Ophir wrote in an email. He and others we spoke with also pointed to our fractured information system as key. The broken system is centered on social media and sensational news media driven by algorithms and personal preferences, as Epicenter NYC’s Felipe de la Hoz recently reported. This ecosphere, maintained through clicks and engagement, feeds on strong feelings and divides.    

“It’s all mass hysteria — it’s manufactured,” said Elisa Crespo, executive director of The New Pride Agenda, a group that advocated for Prop 1, when asked about the spread of concerns around the measure. “It’s meant to get people to have instilled deep feelings that can get them to vote a certain way. And when you haven’t taken the time to actually hear from someone, you’re making assumptions about a community.”

When it comes to “preposterous” misinformation about gender-affirming care, having a deep distrust in mainstream media and other knowledge institutions would make someone a lot more vulnerable to it, Ophir says. They would tend to accept information only when it comes from like-minded people. 

The role of religious identity in misinformation

While media literacy can help protect people from deception, it doesn’t mean more information or education will improve biases, experts warn. “With some issues, studies show that more educated conservatives or religious people are sometimes more misinformed,” Ophir says. 

People who are more religious often rely on intuition and faith, not just in beliefs but in their feelings and perceptions, says Gordon Pennycook, an associate professor of psychology at Cornell University who focuses on reasoning, decision-making, and misinformation. 

“That means that it’s gonna be harder to break in with facts and evidence,” Pennycook said. “It’s not like they’re not amenable to changing their minds, [but] it can’t be something that you’re expecting to do on their own. It’s something that you have to bring to them.”

That’s much easier from a trusted source — someone within their community, not outside it, he adds. 

Misinformation experts say there’s nothing about national origin or immigration status that makes its members more vulnerable to misinformation. But religiousness likely played a role among the Latin American immigrants rallying against Prop 1 at the 90th Street Triangle: Latin American immigrants in the U.S. are more likely than other groups to identify as religious, including Latinos born in the U.S.

Tracking the fate of Prop 1 misinformation

For many, the misinformed argument that kids go to schools and are forced to go through surgery without consent likely came from either Trump on the campaign trail or a trusted messenger in their personal lives, experts say.

Ophir cites previous outrageous claims about gender like the debunked and retracted claim that schools were installing litter boxes in bathrooms for students who identified as cats. 

“The point was to show how outrageous transgender requests were to begin with,” he said. “Conservatives used this piece of misinformation to argue that liberal agendas have gone out of hand.” Sound familiar? 

But unlike similar falsehoods, with the claims around Prop 1, conservative advocates haven’t acknowledged any misinformation. “Prop 1 will almost certainly end Girls-only sports in this state, and it will significantly impinge on parental authority and religious freedoms,” said a spokesperson for the Coalition to Protect Kids-NY in an emailed statement after the measure was passed. 

Still, with Prop 1, misinformation from conservative sources lost the battle. 

Experts signal some of the Republican party inroads in NYC are a result of misinformation campaigns in our city of immigrants. Given this, Peter Bales, a professor in the political science department at Queensborough Community College, cites the importance of civics education, especially for immigrants and young people who are new to this political system.

“People who are here and are going to go for citizenship should have access to classes that will help them obtain that citizenship, but also when they obtain it, be ready to participate in our political system, which is democracy,” he said. 

How to help address misinformation

With local elections coming next year, here are some tips to talk to your friends, family, and neighbors about misinformation:

• Experts say sharing accurate information with people who are misinformed, especially those with deep religious values, is a challenge

• Ask yourself: “Am I the right person to make this argument?” And be honest with yourself. 
• If you are: make your argument easy to understand. Remember, it takes time to correct misinformation. If your message is accurate, it will eventually come through. 

• Recent advances in AI and deepfakes can make it harder to detect misinformation. Colleges and universities have tools that help people distinguish between real and altered images.  

• Educate people on misinformation tactics that might target them. For example, if social media posts or other misinformation campaigns use words like “disgusting” or “vermin” to describe others, they might be using emotional language to draw people to false claims. 

Not to toot the Epicenter NYC horn, but our coverage and those of other community-based partners at URL Media are core to this work. 

For more strategies on how to address misinformation, check out guides from groups like the International Journalists’ Network, Hispanic Executive, and the LatAm Journalism Review. 

See more of our political coverage here.