Nearly half of surveyed Latinos rely on social media sites like TikTok and WhatsApp for their news and information — making them the largest demographic to do so.

That's according to a Pew Research Study on Americans’ social media usage.

This has allowed for the spread of misinformation and disinformation among Latinos, where fact checking in Spanish is less available.

Alba Mendiola is a broadcast journalism and media literacy teacher at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School and a former reporter at Telemundo Chicago. She says many of her students also look to social media for information and reminds them they can’t trust everything they see.

“I always tell them, ‘Do you want to be informed or you want to be influenced?’ Because those influencers out there have their own agendas,” Mendiola said.

Illinois is the first state in the country to include a media literacy requirement in high school curriculums.

Jim Warren is the executive editor at NewsGuard, an organization which analyzes and rates thousands of news and information sites. He was also the former managing editor at the Chicago Tribune.

He says when searching through the internet, news consumers can’t rely on the algorithms of Google, Facebook and other social media sites to provide trustworthy information.

“So we decided we would use trained journalists,” he said. “We came up with nine non-ideological criteria, some of them as simple as ‘Does the site tell you who the owner is? Do they tell you who the editors are? Do they have a corrections policy? Do they run corrections?’”

He added that Telemundo and Univision have received a score of 100/100, making them reputable sources for Latinos looking for Spanish language content.

With her students, Mendiola offers one final tip.

“My best advice,” she said, “is to have a little bit of, like a healthy dose of skepticism.”