Meet Lupita, the character who will help you detect disinformation

Univision and Luminate are partnering to educate Hispanic audiences about disinformation, which are spreading faster and faster on a daily basis and on all different media platforms, from social networks to web sites and TV.

To meet this goal, we have the help of Lupita, la que pone la lupa (Lupita and her magnifying glass), the character who will help users find and detect manipulated content and then explain how to deal with it.

So-called ‘fake news’ is created in sophisticated ways, which includes the manipulation of text, audio, images and videos to create content that seems authentic, but is in fact fictitious or taken out of context. It is then shared by users on social networks again and again, until it goes viral and affects the credibility of media, journalists and institutions.

The Univision and Luminate initiative aims to take on disinformation through Lupita, a young Hispanic woman with an obsession: detecting fake content. It is not always obvious or easy to identify what is true from what is false, and this character—created especially for the campaign against disinformation—has a variety of tools that allow her to detect if the information she is consuming is false or has been manipulated.

In simple terms, Lupita explains how “fake news” is made, how to recognize fake news sites, how photos that have been manipulated or taken out of context reach social media and go viral, and most importantly, how to detect them. In addition, Univision will publish videos, articles, comics and a variety of content that shows why disinformation is harmful, how hard it is to take down a fake news item that has gone viral and how you can verify the content that you consume.

Check some of Lupita's top recommendations:

• Resist the impulse to share information immediately.
• Read the entire article, not just the headline.
• Research its origin: who wrote it, where was it published?
• Check out the date of the publication.
• Examine the URL.
• Look for unusual formats.
• Check who are the experts.
• Pay attention to how the content affects your emotions.
• Learn how to use tools to verify videos and photos.
• Be careful with numbers and content that is presented a facts.

As part of the campaign by Univision and Luminate and in partnership with the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), a workshop will be held on June 29 and 30, ¿Qué chequear, cómo chequear y con qué herramientas lo hago? (What to check, how to check and what tools do I use to do so?), which will focus on teaching people how to recognize false news and what they should and can do to keep it from spreading.

Cristina Tardáguila, associate director of IFCN, in the United States, and Laura Zommer, director of Chequeado, in Argentina, are advisors of the 'Lupita' project.