At the biggest sporting event in the world, a hate campaign tarnished an athlete's path to the podium. Algerian boxer Imane Khelif won gold at the 2024 Paris Olympics amid a wave of online attacks questioning her gender.
Khelif's case became the first fact check for La Factoría, Agência Presentes' newly launched gender and diversity data verification unit. The article unravels this most recent example of gender disinformation, campaigns driven by political actors that encourage and feed on hatred towards women and LGBTQIA+ people. They’re a global phenomenon that have been happening more and more frequently in Latin America, María Eugenia Ludueña, co-director of Presentes, told LatAm Journalism Review (LJR).
“We saw with the pandemic how misleading, distorted, absolutely false information began to grow, especially on social networks,” Ludueña said.
For years, Presentes has published articles combating disinformation about gender and sexual diversity. They’re topics the agency – with headquarters in Buenos Aires and Mexico City – has focused on since its founding in 2016.
Between the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024, Presentes partnered with Mexican website Verificado to fact check gender and sexuality issues that were targets of disinformation in Mexico, such as HIV transmission and the pathologization of transgenderism. Ludueña also participated in the creation of a guide by Chequeado –an Argentine pioneer in fact-checking in Latin America– on how to apply a gender perspective to data.
“We understood that we had to take that and dedicate a specific space and methodology to it,” Ludueña said. “On the other hand, we realized that we had already been doing this work without calling it the fight against disinformation, but rather journalism.”
Visual identity of La Factoría, created by the Mexican design team Andamos Flotando. (Illustration: Andamos Flotando/Agencia Presentes)
Seeing an increase in gender disinformation and working with fact-checking organizations motivated Presentes to officially adopt the fact-checking format and create its own data verification unit.
“Setting up La Factoría was a way to systematize work that we were already doing,” Ana Fornaro, co-director of Presentes, told LJR. “And it also has to do with a political issue that is about coming from the place of saying: 'This speech is disinformation. It is not a question of opinion of the person who says it, it is not a question of the ideology of a media outlet and we are the counter-ideology.'”
“We are going to stand from the place where the big media also stand, deciding what is information and what is disinformation,” she added.
In addition to the partnership with Verificado, the Presentes team trained with Chequeado to learn fact-checking methodology and apply it to gender disinformation.
“We thought it was a great opportunity to promote this specific format that helps debunk disinformation and false things that are said in public discourse, and Agencia Presentes can do it with a specific perspective, seriousness and professionalism,” Olivia Sohr, Chequeado’s director of impact and new initiatives, told LJR.
Sohr had experience on the topic. She edited the report “Gender disinformation during the 2023 Argentine electoral period,” which presented the results of a Chequeado investigation into the main gender disinformation narratives and the principal actors who spread them during the elections in Argentina last year.
According to her, “those who misinform take advantage of all prejudices to make their disinformation reach as far as possible, and that includes gender prejudices.”
“It is important to show how these issues are articulated, how they shape public discussion and how they can cause some issues to enter or exit the agenda depending on how disinformation attacks are created,” Sohr said.
Another reason to investigate gender disinformation is the fact that it has repercussions and is repeated transnationally, imposing itself on the public debate in different countries in a very similar way, influencing political processes such as elections and the creation of public policies.
“There is a regional trend regarding disinformation on these topics. What often seems like a very local discussion and very specific to the politics of a country is actually part of a discussion on these issues that’s at least regional and in many cases global, and so people are systematically misinformed,” Sohr said.
Presentes is dedicated precisely to addressing this topic from a regional strategic perspective, Ludueña said.
“Disinformation operations in the elections in Mexico have points in common with Argentina, with Paraguay, especially in anti-rights groups,” she said. “There are thematic axes that are repeated and there are patterns. Looking at disinformation in Argentina and only in Argentina is not the same as looking at what is happening in Mexico, because they really have in common a lot of news.”
Daniela Mendoza, co-founder and director of Verificado, told LJR that disinformation is one of the main ingredients of hate speech and violence against social minorities. According to her, disinformation agents seek to polarize the population by using widespread prejudices about marginalized social groups, such as LGBTQIA+ people, Indigenous people and migrants.
“Prejudices have a great ingredient of disinformation,” Mendoza said.
According to her, there is a debate within fact-checking about checking hate speech. Verificado “dared to cross this border” of using fact-checking to confront hate speech, “as long as you have data,” she said.
“Hate speech absolutely needs validation to reach people and they often seek that validation in data,” Mendoza said. “I'm not verifying your opinion. I am verifying the data you use to form your opinion.”
Sohr highlighted that fact-checking is a form of journalism that can greatly contribute to improving the quality of data circulating in public debate. But it's not the only tool to combat disinformation, especially gender disinformation.
“More general approaches to explain or denounce these [disinformation] campaigns, show how they are being articulated when they are coordinated attacks and what other tools they are using, how they use them, how this often imitates tactics that are being used in other places, and that type of journalistic investigation that goes beyond fact-checking can be much more useful,” Sohr said.
Mendoza said that Verificado and Agência Presentes coincide in the understanding that, even if they are not subject to verification, hate speech must be exposed for what it is.
“If we cannot dismantle it because it has no data, perhaps we can explain its consequences,” she said. “Hate speech contaminates the media environment, but it can then be converted into campaign proposals, reforms, and basically everything is based on prejudices, ignorance and disinformation.”
