Harris launches WhatsApp channel aimed at bilingual Latino voters

As the Democratic National Convention kicks off Monday in Chicago, the presidential campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris has created a bilingual WhatsApp channel targeting Latino voters.

Campaign officials say the channel is the first-of-its-kind in a presidential election.

It officially launched early Monday with a selfie-style video message from Julie Chavez Rodríguez, manager of the Harris campaign, welcoming new followers to the channel.

Chavez Rodríguez said the channel is a place where users a “can go to get behind-the-scenes” information about the campaign and what it’s doing to help Latino families.

The channel is operated by members of the “Latinos con Harris-Walz” organizing program, according to a news release from the Harris campaign. They will be tasked with creating and posting “culturally competent content that reflects the Latino community that already exists on the platform.”

WhatsApp is an encrypted messaging app used globally to communicate across borders for free, making it ideal for U.S. Latino families looking to stay in touch with relatives in Latin America, in the states and elsewhere.

WhatsApp is more popular among Hispanics than all other U.S. demographic groups, with 54% of Hispanic adults reporting they use the app, a Pew Research Center survey published in January found.

At the same time, Latinos’ greater reliance on messaging platforms such as WhatsApp have disproportionately exposed them to misinformation in both English and Spanish, since there are few effective tools to crack down on the large volume of false information shared bilingually across encrypted private group chats, according to a 2021 Nielsen report.

Harris campaign officials see the new WhatsApp channel as “another tool” to combat election misinformation aimed at Latinos voters, specially among those living in consequential battleground states.

Latino voters stand to reshape the presidential race in ways that are hard to predict since many of them are young people and newly registered voters, according to a memo on a recent Equis Research poll.

This demographic mostly gets their news in English and from digital sources, according to a Pew Research Center study published in March, pointing to significant nuances on how this bicultural and often bilingual set of the American population stays informed.