by Nick Nguyen and Carmen Scurato This story was originally published at Prism. So far the Facebook Papers have led to dozens of stories about how the company knew it was failing to remove hate speech, misinformation, and calls to violence in languages across the globe. As much as this focus on Facebook’s global harm is vital, we shouldn’t overlook the role that the social media language gap plays in harming communities within the United States. On a recent episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver discussed online platforms’ failure to curb the spread of misinformation that wasn’t in English. While companies like Facebook and YouTube have made a few inroads to address the problem in English, they’ve allowed misinformation to spread unchecked in other languages—with disastrous results. In the lead-up to the 2020 election, disinformation campaigns targeted marginalized communities to suppress voter turnout. And during the pandemic, cruel disinformants have blanketed the Latino community with blatant falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccine. The community already makes up a higher percentage of the essential workforce, and Latino people are four times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than the general population. Read more