National

Latino

Axios Latino

Latinos don't think much of Tesla CEO and Twitter owner Elon Musk, according to an exclusive Axios-Ipsos Latino poll in partnership with Noticias Telemundo.

Why it matters: Hispanics are among the fastest-growing consumers in the U.S. and are avid social media users, which could spell trouble for Musk if they continue to shun his electric vehicles or flee Twitter.

Details: Only 33% of Latinos surveyed said they had a favorable opinion of the billionaire, while 41% had an unfavorable view, the poll found.

That's a lower favorable rating than President Biden (47%) and Vice President Kamala Harris (42%) have among Latinos.

It's also only slightly higher than former President Trump, who has a 29% favorability percentage with Hispanics. 

Zoom in: Around 25% of Latinos said they didn't know Musk, suggesting the billionaire is far less known among Latinos than other national figures, Ipsos pollster and senior vice president Chris Jackson tells Axios.

"He's also not necessarily the beloved figure that he may be with some other communities," Jackson said.

Yet Musk's high negatives, along with his unknowns, show Latinos just don't care for him, Republican consultant Mike Madrid, based in Sacramento, Calif., tells Axios. "That's a significant finding."

Background: Twitter saw a rise in hate speech after its acquisition by Musk, who has used to platform to spread conspiracy theories and attack Black Lives Matter and trans activists. 

After a Latino mass shooter, who police said held neo-Nazi views, killed eight people at a Texas mall last month, Musk called for scrutiny of claims about the shooter's alleged white supremacy ties.

Musk also promoted an unfounded conspiracy theory about the shooter.

Of note: Tesla's 2021 Impact Report found that Latinos comprised 24% of Tesla's workforce, but one grassroots group raised concerns that same year that the company's new Austin gigafactory offered few opportunities for residents who only speak Spanish, Axios Austin's Nicole Cobler reports.

Last year, a lawsuit alleged that Black Tesla workers were subjected to verbal racial abuse. Tesla said it strongly opposes all forms of discrimination and harassment.

The intrigue: A majority of Latinos say it's important to shift to electric vehicles to minimize climate change damage, but they still expressed more interest in buying gas-powered cars over EVs, according to the Axios Latino-Ipsos poll.

Only 41% said they would buy a plug-in hybrid or electric-only vehicle, and 22% said they'd look at a plug-in hybrid or electric-only pickup truck.

Between the lines: "If you juxtapose that against the interests in hybrid and electric, it seems like they're more supportive of electric vehicles than they are of Elon Musk," Jackson said.

Methodology: This Axios/Ipsos Latino Poll, in partnership with Noticias Telemundo, was conducted June 2-9 by Ipsos' KnowledgePanel®. This poll is based on a nationally representative probability sample of 1,116 Hispanic/Latino adults age 18 or older.

The margin of sampling error is ±3.5 percentage points at the 95% confidence level, for results based on the entire sample.

Subscribe to Axios Latino to get vital news about Latinos and Latin America, delivered to your inbox on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Austin

blue

A daily look at the most significant and interesting stories affecting Austin. Written by Nicole Cobler and Asher Price.

Axios Austin

Standard

Austin Alerts

Alert

Axios Austin Thought Bubble

Thought Bubble

Austin Members

Membership

Exclusive poll: Latinos give Elon Musk low favorability

Only 33% of Latinos surveyed said they had a favorable opinion of the billionaire.

Chief Executive Officer of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of Twitter, Elon Musk attends the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre on June 16, 2023 in Paris.

Chief Executive Officer of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, attends the Viva Technology conference at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre on June 16, 2023 in Paris. Photo: Chesnot/Getty Images

Hispanic and Latino Americans

Misinformation

President Biden has made the COVID-19 crisis and a post-Trump return to national unity and traditional democratic ideals his top priorities. From vaccinations to stimulus to schools, Biden is seeking bipartisan compromise while showing a willingness to use executive authority and bare Democratic majorities in the U.S. House and Senate to implement his policies. Republican leaders are navigating deep party divisions over if and how to move beyond former President Trump.

Politics & Policy

From the Valley to D.C., Big Tech players like Facebook, Google and Amazon are under more scrutiny than ever as new technology develops and privacy and antitrust concerns grow in lockstep with companies’ ambitions.

Technology

Media Trends

Axios Media Trends

Ahead of the 2024 election cycle, the world's largest tech companies are walking back policies meant to curb misinformation around COVID-19 and the 2020 election.

Why it matters: Social media platforms are arguing that the risk of harm no longer outweighs the benefits of political dialogue, drawing concerns from lawmakers and consumer advocacy leaders.

Driving the news: YouTube last week confirmed that it will reverse its election integrity policy to leave up content that says fraud, errors or glitches occurred in the 2020 presidential election.

YouTube established the policy in December 2020, after enough states had certified the 2020 election results.

The company said in a statement that leaving the policy in place may have the effect of "curtailing political speech without meaningfully reducing the risk of violence or other real-world harm."

Meta on Monday reinstated the Instagram account of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was removed from the platform in 2021 for posting misinformation about COVID.

That content, Meta said at the time, violated its COVID misinformation rules. Meta also removed the Instagram and Facebook accounts for Kennedy's nonprofit, Children's Health Defense. Those accounts remain banned.

Meta's spokesperson said that it reinstated the account because "he is now an active candidate for president of the United States."

Kennedy Jr., the nephew of former president John F. Kennedy and a prominent anti-vaccination voice, announced his bid to take on President Biden in the 2024 Democratic primary. Kennedy Jr. tweeted last week complaining about being unable to register any Instagram accounts.

Be smart: Speech from political candidates has always been regulated differently in the U.S. on public networks.

Broadcast channels, for example, can't censor or deny political ads for including falsehoods.

Meta has long supported that idea and regulates speech from political figures and world leaders differently than everyday accounts. YouTube seems to be headed in a similar direction.

What they're saying: "The problem isn’t that election misinformation exists, but rather that social media as a product amplifies misinformation-at-scale, which makes it everyone’s problem now," said Joan Donovan, a misinformation expert and author of the book "Meme Wars."

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center and founder of Factcheck.org, argued that with a few exceptions — including health threats and real-time incitement of violence — fact-checking is a stronger antidote to misinformation than blocking speech.

The best solution, she argues, is to "flood the zone with the best available information, make sure that when the misinformation gets up there, you've got corrective context with good information up next to it."

Yes, but: Layoffs and cost-cutting measures at Big Tech firms have impacted the trust and safety staff on most major platforms leading up to the 2024 election.

Flashback: During and after the 2020 election, the Black Lives Matter movement and the pandemic, tech platforms instituted stricter misinformation policies to curb threats of real-world harm or violence.

Several platforms, such as YouTube, Twitter and Reddit, banned prominent white supremacist accounts, like those of David Duke and Richard Spencer. (Twitter has since reinstated many of those accounts under Elon Musk.)

After the 2020 Hunter Biden laptop saga, when social media sites blocked a New York Post story from spreading due to fears that it might be fraudulent or contained illegally obtained information, platforms began to tread more cautiously around restricting content.

The big picture: Since Musk bought Twitter and promised "free speech"-first policies, the service has become an attractive platform for politicians who feel disenfranchised by Big Tech.

The company said it would no longer enforce its COVID misinformation policy last November, restored the accounts of prominent election deniers in January and rolled back its policies against misgendering people in April.

In a tweet thread last week, Kennedy Jr. lauded Twitter for allowing "my campaign and me to have a voice" while Meta blocked his accounts. Shortly after, Kennedy Jr. confirmed he would participate in a Twitter Spaces audio event with Musk on Monday.

Musk had said that he would offer any presidential hopeful the chance to join an event like the one he hosted for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

What to watch: Some tech firms are also pulling back some of the restrictions they've traditionally placed on political ads.

Twitter said earlier this year it plans to resume taking some political ads, after mostly blocking them beginning in 2019.

Spotify brought back most political ads after a two-year ban last year.

Disney said last year that Hulu will accept political issue ads — in addition to candidate ads — bringing Hulu's ad policies in line with those of Disney's cable networks.

Big Tech rolls back misinformation measures ahead of 2024

Social media platforms are arguing that the risk of harm no longer outweighs the benefits of political dialogue.

Illustration of a hand pulling a piece of black tape off of text on a speech bubble

Big Tech

Tech Policy

There's a growing fear that political misinformation is spiraling out of control on social media two weeks before the U.S. midterm elections.

Driving the news: Activist groups are sounding the alarm on election-related dis- and misinformation, putting pressure on tech platforms to be more vigilant, per a letter to the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube signed by more than 60 groups and shared exclusively with Axios.

"[I]t remains painfully clear that social media companies are still failing to protect candidates, voters, and elected officials from disinformation, misogyny, racism, transphobia, and violence," the letter reads. It was signed by organizations focused on abortion rights, women's rights, LGBTQ rights, voting rights, anti-racism and tech accountability, including the National Organization of Women, GLAAD and the Global Justice Center.

Concurrently, watchdog group Accountable Tech placed a $250,000 national television and digital ad buy starting this week, criticizing Meta for what the group describes as rolling back election integrity safeguards prior to the midterms.

And cybersecurity firm Recorded Future warned this month that both Russian and Chinese state-sponsored actors are likely to conduct "malign influence operations" targeting U.S. audiences to sway perceptions of the elections.

The big picture: Misinformation and inaccurate narratives perpetuated by high-profile figures on both social and traditional media have made the past few elections even more fraught as Americans retreat into echo chambers.

"There is so much pressure on the social media companies and yet they seem only responsive to a fraction of it," Jiore Craig, head of elections and digital integrity at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), told Axios. "It is worthwhile to all of these groups to apply this pressure, as long as companies remain the only entities who can immediately impact this at scale, at any moment."

How it works: Platforms have largely gotten a handle on the type of foreign meddling seen in 2016. The misinformation landscape is now mostly driven by domestic forces.

In the 2022 midterm election cycle, heated rhetoric toward election workers and public officials has worsened, spurred by continued claims of Trump wrongfully losing the 2020 election, ISD researchers said in an October note.

That includes calls for "vigilante" actions at places like ballot drop-boxes and polling locations, ISD researchers noted. Two people were seen last week lingering in tactical gear near a drop-box in Mesa, Arizona.

What's happening: The letter demands platforms remove false information, hate speech, threats against candidates and election workers. It also asks platforms to address widespread misinformation on abortion and to connect users to legitimate news sources.

The groups also urge the companies to de-platform users who spread misleading information about LGBTQ issues and call for more transparency around moderation decisions.

Accountable Tech's ad buy accuses Meta of disbanding Facebook's Civic Integrity Team, cutting its election-focused staff and not seeing the safeguarding of elections as a priority.

Meta has pushed back against claims that its elections-focused Civic Integrity team was disbanded. Guy Rosen, the company’s chief information security, said in a tweet that the Civic Integrity team was integrated into a more central team to do work across the company.

What they're saying: "We know what's possible when platforms don't act," Bridget Todd, communications director at Ultraviolet, the letter's organizer, told Axios. 

"The problem with platforms is that too often they are reactionary, when election dis- and misinformation can lead to real world violence and threats to democracy."

"While we have to hope something happens in this moment that encourages platforms to do the best they can, we don't have data to suggest that's what they'll do," Jiore said.

The other side: Many platforms have publicized their 2022 midterms strategy.

TikTok launched an elections center in August, offering election and voting information in both English and Spanish. TikTok does not allow paid political advertising and has a policy against election misinformation.

YouTube is prominently recommending authoritative news outlets when users search of midterms content, the company's VP of government affairs Leslie Miller wrote in a September blog post. Miller said YouTube removes content that violates its policies against inciting violence, spreading misinformation or interfering with voting.

Meta says it will provide links to official information about voting and the midterms when people search and has a "dedicated team in place to combat election and voter interference," per an August blog post from president of global affairs Nick Clegg.

Twitter activated its Civic Integrity Policy banning misleading information about elections, which includes placing labels on tweets with disputed information, for the 2022 midterms in August, the company said in a blog post.

Groups demand crackdown on online misinformation ahead of midterms

There is a growing fear that misinformation is spiraling out of control on social media again.

Illustration of an upside down and tattered American flag with a broken grid in the background

Big Tech platforms are blocking abortion-pill distribution information and permitting false narratives about abortion to spread, more than 100 days after the Supreme Court's ruling overturning a constitutional right to abortion.

Why it matters: Social media firms were caught flat-footed by that sudden change in the legal and informational landscape at a time when there's an overwhelming, sudden need for solid information and access to healthcare services online.

The big picture: Abortion rights advocates say that misinformation around reproductive health online has gotten worse since the Dobbs decision in June striking down Roe v. Wade.

"Evidence shows that misinformation and disinformation about reproductive health care, especially abortion, is on the rise on social media platforms and right-wing, anti-choice news sites," Julia Bennett, senior director of digital education and learning strategy at Planned Parenthood, told Axios. 

Driving the news: Most major platforms don't have abortion-specific misinformation policies. Only YouTube has rolled out an abortion-related policy since the Dobbs decision. TikTok includes medical misinformation about vaccines and abortion in its integrity policies.

Per new research from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a nonprofit focused on extremism and disinformation, TikTok, YouTube and Meta have allowed dis- and misinformation about abortion to spread and be monetized in the months since the court's decision.

"Policies that do exist (under health misinformation policies, policies against graphic imagery, etc.) are not properly enforced when it comes to abortion-related content," ISD researchers write in an upcoming study shared with Axios.

Catch up fast: Shortly after Roe was overturned, more than 200 medical organizations and non-profits sent a letter to top executives at Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter saying that "medical disinformation is a threat to public health."

State of play: In addition to false or misleading narratives being circulated on platforms, accounts that link people to information about abortion pills or pro-choice candidates are being flagged and taken down.

Sara Tabatabaie, chief political officer for #Voteprochoice, told Axios that the group was blocked from using its social media content scheduling tool to post on Facebook for allegedly "violating guidelines."

Tabatabaie said this was because the group’s Facebook posts were "flooded with hate comments" and were being "falsely reported."

Women on Web, a nonprofit which connects people to abortion pill access, had its Instagram account taken down without much explanation, Martha Dimitratou, digital strategist for the organization, told Axios. After contacting Meta, she said, Women on Web was told the reason for the suspension was "that our account went against their 'Community Guidelines' by inciting people 'to purchase, sell, raffle, gift, transfer, or trade certain goods and services on our platform.'"

Between the lines: "Access to correct information in this era is even more important than before, given the rapidly-changing laws around abortion," the ISD researchers write, since inaccurate information can lead people "to make dangerous decisions about their healthcare."

Even though the medical facts about abortion are more extensive and stable than those around COVID, the platforms have a "complacency" and "refusal to take hardline action" even when their policies call for it, Jenna Sherman, program manager at the digital health lab at Meedan, a technology nonprofit focusing on technology and reproductive health, told Axios.

False information around medication abortion and other procedures and how they work.

"Undue" comparisons of abortion to tragedies, genocide and the Holocaust.

Non-English speaking countries as an especially weak spot in platforms' efforts to provide reliable abortion information. ISD researchers wrote that YouTube's labels didn't show up when videos were accessed from a non-English speaking country.

Claims that the effects of abortion pills can be "reversed," which experts say are not scientifically based, are particularly worrisome to the medical community. 

 The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says that this treatment is "unproven and unethical."

"The regimen touted as medication abortion reversal is not proven to be effective in a scientifically meaningful way, and in some research, it has been shown to be potentially dangerous," said Nisha Verma, former ACOG fellow and a practicing OB-GYN in Georgia.

Yet some states now require doctors to give women being administered abortion pills information on such treatment, per Politifact.

ISD researchers found promotions of the "reversal" treatment in 1,138 posts on Meta-owned platforms, posted by 559 unique accounts with a combined following of 58 million. 

What they're saying: Elena Hernandez, a YouTube spokesperson, told Axios that the company will remove a video that "provides instructions for unsafe abortion methods or promotes false claims about abortion safety."

Hernandez said YouTube has panels that provide information from local and global authorities in the U.S. and the U.K., and it plans to expand to additional countries and languages.

"We work with independent fact-checking partners to assess content so that we can remove violations of our policies," said Jamie Favazza, a TikTok spokesperson.

The bottom line: Advocates hope to see platforms invest in making their algorithms and moderation systems smarter on abortion information. "I know that platforms are busy, and they have a lot of topics to cover and moderate," said Sherman. "But we all use the internet."

Social media loses ground on abortion misinformation

A new report finds the major online platforms remain in disarray on the issue,  months after the decision striking down Roe v. Wade.

Illustration of a phone growing a wooden Pinocchio nose. 

Abortion

Axios Explains: Abortion

TikTok

The U.S. faces a range of health care flashpoints — unaffordable drugs, opioids, vaping — as we debate whether to adopt universal care. For now, the Affordable Care Act is the law of the land, but Republicans want to issue it a final death blow.

Health

After Big Tech platforms cracked down on political ads in the 2020 election's wake, political advertisers have increasingly flocked to the new Wild West of programmatic ad companies, per a report exclusively shared with Axios.

Why it matters: Programmatic ad companies, which automate the buying and selling of ads on various platforms, have minimal transparency tools and few specific content restrictions.

The report finds that "programmatic advertising through other platforms accounts for a substantial and increasing share of political advertising."

What's happening: Published by the University of North Carolina's Center on Technology Policy, the report, supported in part by the Knight Foundation, looks at the growing impact of programmatic ad companies to understand how they are shaping political speech ahead of the 2022 midterms.

The report looks at ad exchanges, supply-side platforms and demand-side platforms, rather than big ad networks like Taboola or publishers like Hulu. Tech for Campaigns estimates that advertisers spent $2.3 billion on Facebook and Google ads and $1.5 billion on other digital ads in 2019-20.

Consultants quoted in the report say ad money is shifting away from tech platforms as targeting rules get stricter.

Between the lines: Social media platform rules around political advertisements are under close scrutiny, as they serve the majority of digital political ads in the U.S. Yet programmatic political advertising sorely needs clearer policies around content, disclaimers, targeting, transparency and accountability, the report argues.

The Federal Election Commission is very limited in how it can regulate online political advertisements, and legislative efforts to regulate them have failed.

The report offers 12 recommendations for improving regulation and transparency of programmatic political advertising.

What they're saying: "Most of these [programmatic] platforms, their political speech policies for paid speech look kind of like how ad platforms looked in 2012," report co-author Matt Perault, a former head of global policy development at Meta who now directs the North Carolina center, told Axios. 

"We’re only two months from another election cycle, and there’s still so much we don’t know about the online political ads ecosystem," said report co-author J. Scott Babwah Brennen, head of online expression policy at the same center. "We found an ad-tech ecosystem that seems to be designed to be opaque and Byzantine."

The intrigue: No programmatic ads companies reviewed by Perault and Babwah Brennen explicitly prohibit lies about election processes or outcomes, and few make their policies around misinformation in the context of political ads clear. 

Only one programmatic ad company, Xandr, keeps an archive of ads, per the authors' review.

Transparency issues haunt digital ads ahead of midterms

As platforms have tightened rules, advertisers have moved to programmatic ad sellers with laxer standards.

Illustration of an old TV with pop up ads covering the screen.

Online advertising

The FBI's raid of former President Trump's home in Mar-A-Lago has set off another wave of online rage among his supporters, putting tech giants on high alert for new efforts to undermine the legitimacy of U.S. elections.

Why it matters: Tech companies were caught flat-footed by the deluge of  disinformation aimed at delegitimizing the election process and outcome in 2020. Now, amid intense regulatory scrutiny, they are trying to get ahead of a repeat. 

Details: A slew of Big Tech firms debuted new midterm-election policies in the past week, designed to give political campaigns time to adapt to the changes as campaigns ramp up. 

TikTok on Wednesday doubled down on its ban on paid political ads, including paid influencer content. 

The company said it's taking new measures to block influencers and advertisers from forming undisclosed paid political partnerships. 

It also launched its Election Center, an in-app hub with authoritative information about voting and the election, six weeks earlier than it did in 2020.

Meta on Tuesday vowed to remove any misinformation about voting and said it will reject ads encouraging people not to vote or calling into question the legitimacy of the election.

As it did in 2020, Meta will block new political and issue ads during the final week of the election campaign.

It also said that during that week, it would no longer permit any edits to ads that have been previously approved to run.

Twitter last week said it would beginning enforcing its civic integrity policy, which bans the most common types of misinformation about elections and civic events.

It also labels questionable tweets and adds links to credible information or helpful context. 

The company said it will also begin rolling out "prebunks," or blurbs about accurate information about voting and the elections. 

Yes, but: The media landscape has become so fragmented in recent years that even the most careful defensive tactics by the most popular social media firms won't be able to halt the spread of election misinformation — including the "big lie" that Trump won in 2020, a claim supported by no credible evidence.

Cable news networks, podcasts, encrypted messaging apps, email, direct mail, and alternative social networks provide a huge breeding ground for misleading  election information. And the spreaders of election denialism are very adept at navigating a sprawling and ever-changing media landscape. 

The big picture: The shift in election misinformation online from mostly Russian, state-backed campaigns in 2016 to more domestic, fringe networks now presents social media firms with a difficult free speech challenge.

Coordinated inauthentic behavior campaigns by state-backed actors are often easier to identify and stop than misinformation spread by everyday users.

Twitter's decision to block a New York Post story about Hunter Biden's laptop from being shared in the month leading up to the 2020 election triggered a  sweeping backlash from conservative users who felt that the company had censored the story for political purposes. (Twitter's former CEO later said that decision was a mistake.) 

What to watch: More companies are putting resources towards combating election and voting misinformation in languages other than English, following revelations over the past year of election misinformation campaigns targeting Spanish-language voters.

Meta said it's putting more infrastructure in place to show accurate information about voting to users in a second language other than English. 

Twitter's prebunks will be presented in English, Spanish and all other languages supported on Twitter. 

TikTok's Elections Center will include resources in more than 45 languages, including English and Spanish. 

Big Tech braces for "big lie" in 2022 midterms

The FBI's Mar-a-Lago raid stirred up the right, and online platforms foresee new waves of election misinformation.

Illustration of a "vote" pin with a long nose growing out of it

Elon Musk

After Twitter began offering further monkeypox information to users, GLAAD is putting out a call for other social media platforms to follow suit.

Why it matters: As monkeypox has spread in the U.S., so has online misinformation about how it is contracted and who is at risk.

The fact that the virus has so far spread primarily among men who have sex with men has fueled misconceptions that monkeypox is a sexually transmitted infection.

What's happening: When Twitter users search the term "monkeypox" on the social media site, they are presented with a link to the Department of Health & Human Services and invited to "Know the facts."

GLAAD told Axios that they are calling on Meta, TikTok and YouTube to also steer users to trusted sources of medical information about monkeypox.

What they're saying: "Twitter's action will not only help stem the tide of MPV misinformation, but is also a clear example of leadership underscoring that institutions across all of civil society can play roles towards addressing this public health emergency," said GLAAD CEO Sarah Kate Ellis in a statement.

"Though anyone can contract MPV, it is disproportionately impacting the LGBTQ community, especially men who have sex with men, and it is urgent and critical to get the facts around vaccines, treatment, and prevention widely and equitably distributed."

Between the lines: The call for action comes a month after GLAAD released a report that gave major social media sites a failing grade when it came to protecting LGBTQ users on their networks.

The report gave points to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok for having at least some policies protecting LGBTQ users from harassment and attack, but took points away for both the limitations of their policies as well as actions taken in upholding them.

GLAAD calls on social media to push monkeypox info

As monkeypox has spread in the U.S., so has online misinformation.

Illustration of patterns of hospital plus turned into x’s and one right side up

Monkeypox

There is a clear and growing link between Russian propaganda and online far-right extremism globally, according to a new study from researchers at the George Washington University. 

Why it matters: The findings suggest the influence of Russian media on these communities is organic, which makes it harder to stop.

"It's almost like a fog of war," said Neil F. Johnson, a physicist who co-authored the report. "It would be so easy if it were organized in some sense. It's unfortunately not that way."

Links to Russian media shared by online extremist groups, by platform

Data: George Washington University; Table: Thomas Oide/Axios Visuals

Percentage of online extremist groups that posted links to Russian media, by platform

Driving the news: The data gives context to recent real-world hate crimes, most notably the mass shooting in Buffalo, N,Y., last month. 

"Our paper establishes a connection of these two worlds: Russian media promoting certain types of narratives around themes like immigration or racism, and a whole ecology of extreme communities online listening to them," Johnson said.

A network of hate groups amplifies exiting narratives about white nationalism in a way that seeps into the mainstream, he noted. Those messages are often first spread on fringe platforms, often encrypted chat apps and gaming networks.

Russian media drives online hate

Extremist groups spread Russian propaganda organically.