KANSAS CITY, Kan. — Last month, several Hispanic small businesses experienced a decline in sales due to the spread of a viral social media post alleging the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Kansas City, Kansas.
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Supremo Barbershop and Beauty, located along 14th and Central Street, saw a drop in appointments and foot traffic.
“It not only affects us as businesses, it affects an entire community," said Angelica Hernandez, owner of Supremo Barbershop and Beauty.
Just down the road, an up-and-coming trendy Cuban coffee shop, Cortadito, reported having a sluggish morning while employees were busy answering phone calls from concerned clients wanting to know if ICE was conducting raids inside their establishment.
"They were saying that ICE was hitting up Central Avenue here in Kansas City, Kansas, going to all the local Hispanic businesses and taking people. And I'm like, 'We're here, we're in this area, and we have seen nothing,'" said Nubia Gomez, co-owner of Cortadito.
The post was published via Facebook and shared by thousands while generating hundreds of concerned responses.
KSHB 41 commented on the post and reached out to the individual behind the post but never heard back.
"It's making our people stay home, it's making our people be scared, and it's making our people just start sending messages like, 'If I'm caught, then, you know, don't worry about me.' Things like that. ... It's just heartbreaking," Gomez said.
A 2021 Nielsen report found distorted information is an issue impacting Latinos beyond KCK's borders.
The report concluded Latinos are the fastest-growing minority group in the U.S. and are spending the most time on social media apps. Thus, the increase in use poses a threat.
McKenzie Sanchez-Gomez, an employee at Cortadito, agreed with the report, saying the increase in use among Latinos is due to the ability to keep in touch with family in another country.
For her and her family, it's a way to keep up with their loved ones in Mexico, who they haven't seen since her grandfather's passing.
“You’re kind of back where you have visited or grown up your whole life," Sanchez-Gomez said.
The Neilsen report also found young Hispanics between the ages of 18-34 are over twice as likely to use WhatsApp and Telegram. Both applications are a form of free messaging and video calling apps.
“It’s a way to navigate what’s going on around my business and what’s going on in the Hispanic community," explained Hernandez, who is an avid user of WhatsApp.
The same report found Spanish speakers are most likely to face a greater risk of being exposed to misinformation due to content and user-generated posts available in different forms of Spanish, challenging conventional fact-checking and content moderation procedures.
"It is an incredibly complex and beautiful language, but it's different across the world, and so finding the messaging that makes the most sense is important," said Edgar Palacios, founder of Latinx Education Collaborative and Revolución Educativa.
Palacios said media literacy is emerging as a focal point for his nonprofits.
His team is offering resources on how to consume media and vet information through community digital training courses in English and Spanish, while actively building a network of trusted sources living in KC who they can use to vet information that has gone viral.
"We are in a world at the moment where fear and misinformation, and kind of like this unsteadiness, is designed to do exactly what it's doing right — it is destabilizing communities in ways that we don't even understand sometimes," Palacios said.
As nonprofits fight against misinformation, so are KCK businesses.
Hernandez told KSHB she’s determined to cut out salon chatter and keep her barber shop a safe space.
“We’re not going to speculate because I don’t want to be the one that causes panic to others," she said
In between taking coffee orders, Sanchez-Gomez pushes her clients and family to validate facts.
"I tell my mom all the time, when you see something that you think is too good to be true, or it just seems too laced with a lot of fear, just look it up, see if it's true. Google's free, and it's the best advice I can give," Sanchez-Gomez said.
Gomez said her goal is to continue learning the ins and outs of managing a new business while advocating for information and news to cater to all.
"Yes, we can use a lot of applications to translate into Spanish, like Google Lens or Google Translator, whatever the case may be. But still, things get lost in translation," she said.
KSHB 41 reached out to multiple agencies and received confirmation from civic groups and law enforcement agencies that there were no large-scale ICE raids in KC.
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National News Literacy Week is an annual event presented by the News Literacy Project in partnership with The E.W. Scripps Company and USA TODAY. The week raises awareness of news literacy as an essential life skill and provides educators and students with easy-to-adopt tools and tips for becoming news-literate. Throughout the week, the News Literacy Project provides educators with resources to use in the classroom and suggests ways for the public to support the movement to teach news literacy. This is the sixth annual event, which takes place the first full week of February. Visit this year’s website here.