In early 2018, as Mexico’s presidential election heated up, photos began circulating online. They showed murals that had sprung up in Venezuela, signed by the country’s United Socialist Party, supporting the populist Mexican candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador. 

After the pictures made headlines, the López Obrador campaign scoffed at the suggestion of a Venezuelan connection and accused opponents of engineering the whole thing. The incident was just one example of how misleading political content proliferated across social media in the run-up to the election. One analysis found that bots and influencers generated nearly one-fifth of content on Twitter in Mexico in March 2018. 

Nearly three years later, Mexican journalists are gearing up for a localized fight against political disinformation ahead of the country’s June midterm elections, where voters will pick candidates in Congressional, gubernatorial, and state legislative races.

The election season has journalists on alert. Expecting a fresh surge of political disinformation, the independent Mexican digital media outlet Animal Político is teaming up with six newsrooms in the states of Chihuahua and Sinaloa to monitor and verify election-related information. The project is the latest iteration in a multi-newsroom fact-checking initiative called Verificado 2018, which worked throughout the 2018 election period to debunk false claims and then stopped publishing when the race came to a close.