The Cat-Eating Hysteria is a Flashing Red Light For November’s Election

This week, a deranged myth about Haitian immigrants somehow found its way from the bowels of the internet all the way up to the former president of the United States, his most prominent supporters, and eventually the ABC News debate stage on Tuesday night, where Donald Trump raged “they’re eating the pets” to tens of millions of viewers. The ease with which this false information spread — and the fact that even after it was debunked, people in positions of authority continue to claim it as true — is an alarming omen for the November election, which already promised to be a firestorm of misinformation.

I won’t scar you with the grim details of this ridiculous story, so I’ll try to summarize it briefly: rumors spread this week on social media that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, which is home to a significant population of new arrivals from the conflict-torn nation, were abducting and killing local pets. Cats and ducks, specifically. The rumors made their way to the accounts of prominent figures on the right, who used them to bash the current administration’s immigration policy. The Trump campaign, JD Vance, Elon Musk, and too many others to count jumped on board, posting memes that showed dark-skinned migrants chasing Trump as he rescued small kittens. It was all very ugly.

News outlets dug into the claims and spoke with local officials who confirmed there was no evidence to support any of them. In fact, they were all completely made up. Yet no corrections were issued. Somehow, its chief proponents are doubling down.

Musk shared a post from an account called “Dumb Bitch Capital” that conceded the possibility that a woman caught on video killing a cat was “technically” not a Haitian migrant. Still, the account argued, “none of that even matters. It was never about the damn cat,” before listing a litany of anti-immigrant arguments unrelated to the rumors of Haitians eating pets.

Vance, who previously declared, inaccurately, that “reports now show” people had their pets “eaten” by illegal immigrants, posted to X, formerly Twitter, that he was standing by his false claim because he “received many inquiries from actual residents of Springfield” asking about the rumors. “It’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false,” he conceded, before calling on his supporters to “Keep the cat memes flowing” regardless.

Vance was confronted about that stance on CNN after the debate Wednesday night. “If someone calls your office and says they saw Bigfoot, that doesn’t mean they saw Bigfoot,” Kaitlan Collins told the senator. “You have a sense of responsibility as a running mate, and he certainly does as the candidate to not promote false information, right?”

Inquiries are certainly not evidence. Local Ohio officials said they have been getting calls about the rumors for months. But unlike Vance, instead of fanning the flames, they looked into the claims and found them to be meritless. As Clark County Park District executive director Leann Castillo told The New York Times, they “have absolutely no evidence of this happening.”

None of this stopped Trump from bringing up the fake story at Wednesday night’s debate. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” Trump said in a furious rant. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

The spread of these inflammatory lies does nothing to address any real concerns residents of Ohio might have about immigration to their communities. Nor does it reckon with the fact that native born Americans have an incarceration rate that is 3.5 times higher than Haitian immigrants — both legal and illegal. But it does raise alarming questions about the proliferation of misinformation online and the devastating consequences that could have when it comes to the election this November.

Musk, the owner of Twitter and arguably its most influential denizen, has proven himself to be excessively credulous of bogus election fraud claims. He reposted a video during Venezuela’s election earlier this year which he said showed ballot boxes being stolen. A not-very-close inspection of the video, however, revealed the “ballot boxes” to be air conditioning units.

Of course, Venezuela’s election was certainly fraudulent; but that the owner of X and one of its most influential accounts fell so easily for such obvious fake news is a bad omen for what comes next: an election Trump is certain to attempt to undermine if he loses.

We know how that ended in 2020, with a violent riot at the U.S. Capitol, one so bloody four police officers killed themselves in the months afterwards. This year, it could be worse. After all, Trump is being backed not by Rudy Giuliani and a small cadre of hapless boosters, but by some of the most powerful and influential figures in the world.

Musk’s promotion of election lies has already had consequences. Election officials in the swing state of Pennsylvania said they were inundated with residents pushing conspiracy theories after the owner of X falsely claimed on the platform that millions of noncitizens were registered to vote. They have issued warnings about what could happen come election day.

Just last year, Musk assured CNBC anchor David Faber that he would not allow election fraud misinformation to fester on X. He acknowledged the 2020 election was not stolen and said of anyone spreading false information about elections “will be corrected.”

The problem now is that the election lies are coming from Musk himself. After endorsing Trump, Musk abandoned his prior caution and dove headfirst into the conspiracy theory swamplands of the former president’s most radical supporters.

In the last few weeks he has relentlessly attacked the integrity of U.S. elections. In one instance he railed against mail-in ballots, which he has used himself on multiple occasions. In another, a Republican election official in Arizona smacked down his claim the state was refusing to remove undocumented immigrants from voter roles.

In one particularly deranged outburst, Musk suggested those who opposed a piece of Republican legislation to stop non-citizens from voting in U.S. elections (which is already a federal crime) are “traitors” who deserve to be executed.

It’s not just Musk’s own feed. He obliterated the guardrails that kept Twitter a marginally useful source of information after he bought the platform for $44 billion back in 2022. He axed the platform’s “election integrity team” that was charged with combatting disinformation around elections across the globe. He lifted bans on a series of notorious purveyors of misinformation that had been banished from Twitter, including Alex Jones and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.

The result is X as it exists today — a dizzying river of extremist rhetoric, false information, and culture war hysteria. The only remaining guardrail against the mass proliferation of fake news is Community Notes, a feature that can be useful but has been applied, as far as I can tell, to none of the posts over the past few days pushing the false claim Haitian migrants are eating pet cats. Any proposed corrections are simply drowned out by Musk’s fans. It’s impossible to imagine that on election day in November, Community Notes will be able to combat the avalanche of bogus election information unleashed onto the platform by some of its biggest accounts, from Musk (197 million followers) to Trump (90 million).

The consequences could be dire. The nightmare scenario, where a sitting president successfully steals an election, came dangerously close to happening in 2020. With Musk and others pushing so much false information with absolute impunity, that nightmare scenario has a better chance than ever of becoming a reality.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.