Where there is no information, there is business.

In September 2025, a   joint investigation of   Migrant Connection and   Fact-checking documented for seven months what many people in transit experience daily: an industry built on the lack of official information. The websites of COMAR (the Mexican agency in charge of asylum) had been outdated since 2016. Its presence on TikTok, the platform where migrants most frequently seek information, was nonexistent. In this void, at least 60 accounts flourished, systematically spreading misleading content, and almost half of those surveyed reported having been victims of some type of digital fraud.

“The problem isn’t just the lies, but the lack of reliable, timely information in the correct language,” says Laura Zommer, Ashoka Fellow and co-founder of Factchequeado. Zommer has tracked how disinformation migrates with people: the same lies adapt from country to country, from regulatory change to regulatory change. Before, the “American Dream” was sold; today, after the tightening of Trump’s policies and the elimination of CBP One (the app that allowed people to request asylum appointments at the U.S. border), social media promotes Mexico as a “Plan B.” The narrative changes, but the logic remains the same.

Patricia Mercado, a journalist, director of Conexión Migrante, and member of the Hello World Accelerator , confirms this with data: almost half of the migrants surveyed had been victims of digital fraud. But the damage goes beyond individual scams—disinformation is also used as a political weapon. Zommer recalls the campaigns that were massively disseminated in the United States.   The false idea that migrants were entering the country to vote illegally . "The narrative was planted months in advance, and it exploded on election day."

Recently, this pattern has been repeating itself in other regions. In April 2026, Spain approved the extraordinary regularization of hundreds of thousands of migrants . Within days, social media was flooded with fake news: that regularized migrants could vote in the next elections, that they would automatically obtain citizenship, that all deportation orders would be annulled. The platform   Maldita , founded by Clara Jiménez Cruz, an Ashoka fellow , has spent weeks debunking these pieces of misinformation one by one—using data, official sources, and a citizen community that actively collaborates in detecting so-called “fake news.” The same logic that Zommer describes in Latin America operates here: when a policy moves in favor of inclusion, disinformation is activated to stop it.

And to all this is added artificial intelligence. It has already been documented.   There are cases where ChatGPT delivers erroneous answers about immigration procedures in such a convincing tone that it's difficult to distinguish them from professional advice. A rumor in a WhatsApp group breeds distrust; an answer formulated with the authority of an artificial intelligence tool leads to incorrect decisions.

The answer already exists, and it comes from those who need it most.

Faced with this ecosystem of fraud, the question is: who fills the void with reliable information? The answer, in many cases, is already underway: it comes from the migrant communities themselves and from organizations that innovate from within the territory (many of them from the Hola América ecosystem itself).

Conexión Migrante, which, along with Factchequeado, documented the disinformation industry described above, has spent years doing the exact opposite of what fake TikTok accounts do: producing verified, free, and accessible information for people in transit through Mexico. Patricia Mercado understands the problem from both sides—she investigates it and builds the alternative at the same time.

In Chile,   Infomigra has developed a free information system for migrants that combines a mobile app, website, social media, and printed materials; designed to deliver information about rights and procedures in accessible formats and when needed. Alexis Torreblanca, coordinator of Infomigra, is part of the Hola Accelerator program.

And in Mexico,   RacismoMX addresses a layer that often remains invisible in the conversation about migration misinformation: the structural racism that allows certain narratives to take hold more easily than others. Through research, educational content, and legal support, RacismoMX highlights how racism shapes the way societies perceive and treat migrants and other vulnerable populations. Its founder, José Antonio Aguilar, is an Ashoka Fellow , and Marisol Aguilar, deputy director, is part of the Hola Accelerator.

These initiatives share something fundamental: they stem from direct knowledge of the communities they serve. They produce trustworthy information because they understand the context, speak the right language, know the actual procedures, and are where people need them. That's what building information infrastructure means: networks of organizations that research, verify, and distribute information from and for migrant communities.

The fight over the narrative is a fight over agency.

The challenge goes beyond combating lies. Where today there is disinformation, fraud, and manipulation, there are also networks of trust built by, with, and for migrant communities—organizations that investigate, verify, and distribute information because they understand the context from within and see migrants as agents of change. Without these networks, the situation would be even more dire.

In   At Hello World, we work to increase the impact of these initiatives. Since 2020, our regional chapter focused on Latin America, Hola América, has made changing the narrative on migration a strategic priority; building a shared framework, activating networks of communicators and social entrepreneurs, and experimenting with formats ranging from journalism to culture.

The Narrative Lab, launched in the   The Hola América 2025 Festival brings together communicators, journalists, and storytellers from across the region to rethink how migration is discussed and to develop strategies for bringing this narrative to new audiences. Because when information is lacking or other interests are at play, the conditions are created for discourses that portray migration as a crisis to proliferate. These are not isolated cases, but rather part of a broader pattern of democratic erosion.

Hello World is Ashoka's global initiative on migration. For ten years, we have worked in Europe (Hello Europe) and Latin America (Hola América) with a clear premise: people on the move are agents of change, and individual solutions are insufficient. We bring together social entrepreneurs, businesses, policymakers, and researchers to transform systems surrounding migration. We work on four key drivers of change: who is at the table, what tools they have, how they collaborate, and what rules define what is possible. Our main platform at the moment is the Hola Accelerator, in collaboration with IKEA Social Entrepreneurship, with four pilot programs underway on both continents.

Ashoka is the pioneering organization for social entrepreneurship. For forty years, we have supported the world's most innovative social entrepreneurs and the patterns of change that emerge from their work.