For the past few election cycles, the messaging app WhatsApp has been a major source of news and connection — and misinformation — for Latinos in the United States, a forum where they could swap memes, jokes and emojis with one another across the nation and Latin America.
Now, Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, are joining the platform.
The Harris-Walz campaign announced on Monday that it was starting a broadcasting channel on the messaging app in an effort to reach Latino voters, a critical slice of the American electorate that Democrats have struggled to shore up and whose decisions at the ballot box could prove decisive in November.
Campaign officials said the channel would be the first of its kind in a presidential election. It is set to be unveiled with a bilingual selfie-style video that features Ms. Harris’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez-Rodriguez. The channel will offer users a behind-the-scenes look at the campaign and the latest news about Ms. Harris’s platform, they said.
It will be run by Latino staff members within the campaign, with daily voice memos, videos and notes featuring surrogates and supporters. It will also serve as a tool to combat misinformation and disinformation, officials said.
The move is the latest by the campaign to seek new, young and highly online audiences as coconut emojis and “brat” summer memes have proliferated — often in the banner color of chartreuse.
More than half of the U.S. Latino population is estimated to regularly use WhatsApp, which allows users to send text messages and make phone calls free over the internet, and the app has long beat out other social media sites, including Instagram and Facebook, in popularity across Latin America.
For Latino immigrants in particular, it has become a center of connectedness. But the app has also been a major source of misinformation.
As the coronavirus shut down nearly every aspect of regular life amid the 2020 presidential election, causing many people to spend more time in front of their screens, misinformation about the virus, along with posts meant to confuse and dissuade Black and Latino voters from heading to the polls, spread fast and wide. When protests swept the globe over the murder of George Floyd, the app helped spread exaggerated claims that leftists were burning down buildings in American cities.
An official with WhatsApp said at the time that it was taking steps to curb abuse. The Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism organization, announced the creation of a collective that included the Telemundo and Univision networks to combat misinformation on the app.
In the 2024 election, Latino voters are at the center of a tug of war between Democrats and Republicans. Early polls, including new surveys from The New York Times and Siena College, paint a portrait of a potentially reshaped race, with a jump in support for Ms. Harris among Latino voters. However, reliable polling data remains limited.