How right-wing social media took false claims about Haitians eating pets to the debate

The warning about “our beloved pets” appeared for the first time in early September, in a post on a community Facebook page called Springfield Ohio Crime and Information.

The post claimed a Springfield resident who had lost her pet cat arrived home from work one day to find Haitians butchering the animal in their front yard.

“They were carving it up to eat,” the post said.

The accusation was shocking, but, in at least one way, it was like any other post on any other neighborhood Facebook page. Someone heard a rumor and decided to share it. No evidence. No eyewitness. Just someone with a story to tell and an internet connection.

The Springfield page is a tiny outpost in a vast online world, so that might have been the end of it. But within days, the claim that Haitian migrants were eating pets in Springfield raced around the world, fueled mainly by right-wing influencers on the social media site X.

The rumor traveled from the private Facebook page with about 8,000 members where it first appeared, to a large, loosely connected network of conservative activists, to a presidential debate stage, where former President Donald Trump repeated the allegation on live TV to 67 million Americans.

The consequences came swiftly. A national political firestorm erupted, Haitian migrants said they felt unsafe in the community and authorities reported 33 bomb threats that forced the evacuation of public buildings and the deployment of state police to every school in Springfield.

It didn’t matter that there was no proof to back up the story, or that city officials declared it was false, or even that the woman who posted it, a Springfield resident named Erika Lee, would later delete her post and say she regretted sharing a rumor unsupported by evidence.

All that mattered was that the story became yet another way to enrage, excite and exasperate millions in a deeply divided America.

“It just exploded,” Lee told NBC News. “I didn’t think it would ever get past Springfield.”

This is how it happened.

Sept. 5, 6:02 p.m. – LemmiesLuLu, @BuckeyeGirrl

Soon after Lee’s post appeared on the private Facebook page, it showed up again on X when a conservative account, @BuckeyeGirrl, shared a screenshot of the post. This time, the potential audience was much larger.

The owner of the account, a self-described Springfield native and Trump supporter, introduced Lee’s post about Haitians eating pets as evidence supporting previous claims by BuckeyeGirrl that Haitians were eating ducks they took from the city park. “Well, now it’s your pets,” she wrote.

Although BuckeyeGirrl only had about 2,000 followers at the time, the post started making the rounds on X among other conservative influencers and activists. In a little over a week, almost 1 million people on X had viewed the post. At least some of those viewers had bigger followings than BuckeyeGirrl and would soon join her in spreading the rumor.

Sept. 6, 3:13 p.m. – End Wokeness, @EndWokeness

The next day, in the early afternoon, an X account called End Wokeness, shared the image from Lee’s Facebook post with its more than 3 million followers. The person or people who maintain the End Wokeness account are anonymous, but there’s no mystery about their political views. The account, which sometimes posts dozens of comments and images a day, regularly mocks liberals, praises Trump and ridicules journalists.

When End Wokeness shared Lee’s Facebook post Sept. 6, it placed it alongside a photo of a Black man carrying a dead goose, suggesting it was taken in Springfield. But it wasn’t. According to the photographer, who asked not to be named when he spoke to The Columbus Dispatch last week, he took the photo in Columbus in July and shared it online via a Reddit channel. “I hate that the picture that I took is being weaponized to use against immigrants,” he said.

Sept. 7, 8:27 p.m. – Ian Miles Cheong, @stillgray

On Sept. 7, a conservative influencer named Ian Miles Cheong, who has 1 million followers on X, shared a video of police arresting a woman accused of eating a dead cat.

The video had nothing to do with Springfield or Haitians. Instead, it involved a woman in Canton, Ohio , who faces animal cruelty charges and a mental competency hearing in October. But the video, like the photo of the man carrying the goose, quickly became part of the social media narrative about Springfield.

Cheong’s post eventually got 5.8 million views. Those views matter to Cheong because he makes money from his X account, either through subscribers or ad revenue shared with X. In 2023, Cheong said in an X post that he earned $16,259 from ads connected to his posts. He didn’t say whether he made that money over weeks or months, but X rewards accounts that generate high engagement with viewers. The more people interact with his posts, the more money Cheong can make.

Sept. 8, 9:29 a.m. – End Wokeness, @EndWokeness

More videos emerged on X the next day when multiple accounts began sharing clips from an Aug. 27 Springfield City Commission meeting. At that meeting, a Springfield-based YouTuber named Anthony Harris, who regularly posts videos of himself musing about life or asking strangers random questions, told city officials that Haitians were eating ducks and geese from the park.

“They’re in the park grabbing up ducks by their neck and cutting their head off and walking off with them and eating them,” he said. Harris, who was wearing a sweatshirt promoting his candidacy for “Clark County Mayor,” which is not an elected position in Clark County, offered no evidence to support his claim.

How did he hear about it? He was tagged in a Facebook post by a Springfield woman, who heard the story from her co-worker, who heard it from her brother-in-law, who claimed to have seen a Haitian man kill a goose in front of children.

Sept. 9, 12:25 a.m. – Tyler Oliveira, @tyleraloevera

The day before the debate, on Sept. 9, a YouTuber with an X account named Tyler Oliveira began posting a series of short videos of himself doing man-on-the-street interviews with Springfield residents, including Anthony Harris. Some interviews focused on complaints about problems, such as rising housing costs, associated with the recent influx of immigrants in Springfield. Others zeroed in on the rumors about disappearing pets.

In one video, a man used a racial slur to describe his Haitian neighbor. In another, a man said he’d heard that Haitians had been caught driving a van filled with 100 cats, which they intended to eat. “We’ve lost a whole bunch of cats,” he said.

Other influencers began posting similar videos, which were widely shared and viewed at least in part because X’s algorithm promotes posts featuring videos and images , especially those that generate large numbers of replies. By contrast, posts that include links, such as those that take viewers away from X and to mainstream news sites, don’t appear as often in users’ feeds .

Sept. 9 – Jack Poso, @JackPosobiec | Elon Musk, @elonmusk | Benny Johnson, @bennyjohnson

Then came the memes. The social media furor over the pet rumors in Springfield inspired a flood of AI-generated photos of Trump saving cats from zombies, cuddling ducks in ponds and protecting Springfield from migrants. The images were shared by conservative voices, including X owner Elon Musk, prominent politicians and monetized accounts.

The GOP’s House Judiciary X account, which has almost a half million followers, posted a photoshopped image of Trump hugging a duck and a kitten. When Musk shared that post, it got more than 84 million views. Because X’s “for you” news feed emphasizes popular posts, like the one Musk shared, content like the Springfield rumors began showing up more often in users’ feeds, including the feeds of those who didn’t typically follow conservative accounts.

Sept. 9, 10:22 a.m. – JD Vance, @JDVance

The rumors got a major boost early on Sept. 9 from JD Vance, Ohio’s junior senator and Trump’s running mate, when he reminded X users that he’d been complaining about Haitian migrants in Springfield for months. He embraced the latest rumors as one more reason to remove them from the city, even though authorities said most were living and working there legally.

“Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” Vance wrote. Conservatives on X praised Vance for joining the fray, while Democrats and others complained that a potential future vice president shouldn’t amplify rumors that they said were rooted in racist tropes about immigrants.

Sept. 9, 6:23 p.m. – Charlie Kirk, @charliekirk11

Conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, jumped to Vance’s defense and celebrated his decision to share the Springfield rumors. Kirk, who once called white people “the most hated class in America today,” had been posting on X about Haitian migrants in Springfield for days.

In his Sept. 9 post, Kirk criticized journalists for pointing out there was no evidence to support the claims about eating pets and suggested he and other right-wing voices were the only ones speaking for Springfield residents. Kirk included in his post the video of Anthony Harris talking about Haitians eating ducks. The claim, Kirk said, is “supported by a widespread outcry from Springfield residents.”

Sept. 10 – Charlie Kirk, @charliekirk11

On the day of Trump’s debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, Donald Trump Jr., Kirk and others took to X to declare they had confirmed the rumors of Haitians eating animals in Springfield.

Their source? A “leaked 911 call” from a man who told the Clark County Sheriff’s office he saw four Haitians carrying dead geese near a creek. The man provided no evidence. City officials and state investigators later said they also found no evidence to support the claim. When The Enquirer called the phone number the man gave dispatchers, the person who answered said it was a wrong number.

Soon, however, others would cite the 911 call as proof there was truth behind the rumors about Haitians in Springfield. Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, a Republican, was among them. In a post a day later, Yost said residents who claimed Haitians were killing and eating ducks and geese would be “competent witnesses in court.”

Sept. 10, 6:11 p.m. – Laura Loomer, @LauraLoomer

A few hours before the debate, far-right activist and failed congressional candidate Laura Loomer, who some Republicans have referred to as “toxic,” “racist” and “a crazy conspiracy theorist,” posted a meme of cats wearing MAGA hats and carrying guns. It was a screenshot of a post from Trump’s account on Truth Social. Trump also posted a meme of himself on a plane, surrounded by cats and ducks.

At the time, according to national media reports, Loomer was traveling with Trump. It’s not known why she was with him, but for days she had been amplifying the rumors about Haitians eating ducks, geese and pets in Springfield. “The Biden-Harris regime has imported over 20,000 cannibalistic Haitians who are now killing people’s pets and hunting domestic animals on the streets of Ohio,” Loomer wrote in one of her posts.

Sept. 10, 7:56 p.m. – Charlie Kirk, @charliekirk11

Six days after the rumor about Haitians eating pets appeared on Facebook, the tale had reached millions of Americans, been endorsed by politicians and traveled across social media platforms, such as Tik Tok, X, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram.

Late on Sept. 10, about an hour before the debate, Kirk declared in an X post that the rumors he’d been sharing for days were being talked about by “EVERYONE” his team spoke to in Springfield. He cited this as further proof that the claims he’d been popularizing were real. Likewise, some of those residents repeated rumors they’d seen online from influencers like Kirk as proof the claims were real.

The relationship between those spreading the rumors and those viewing them online had become a kind of feedback loop, amplifying the claims even more.

Sept. 10 – Trump-Harris presidential debate

Early in the debate, Trump mentioned the rumors about Springfield. “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in,” he said. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

According to Google Trends, which measures terms people are searching on Google, interest in the Springfield rumors shot up immediately after Trump mentioned them in the debate. Searches related to Springfield more than doubled in the 24 hours after the debate.

What's happening now?

In the days after the debate, Trump leaned into the Springfield rumors, even as local officials, police and Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said they were untrue and harmful.

Trump’s posts on Truth Social mirrored many of those that had appeared on X and other social media accounts in the days leading up to the debate, including the 911 call, the video of Anthony Harris talking about Haitians killing geese in the park, and memes depicting cats and ducks in peril. One meme he posted featured AI-generated cats standing in front of a sign that said, “Don’t let them eat us.”

Vance, his running mate, also continued to share false claims related to migrants eating pets. On Sept. 14, Vance shared a post from conservative activist Christopher Rufo, purporting to show someone cooking a cat on a grill in Dayton, Ohio. The origin of the video is unknown. Officials in Dayton said the claim was "baseless."

Five days after the debate, on Sept. 15, Vance defended his promotion of baseless claims that Haitians were eating pets in Springfield, telling CNN's Dana Bash the claims came from his constituents. None of those constituents, however, had provided proof. And local and state officials continued to say the claims were false.

Vance didn't back down. "The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes," Vance said. "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do."

This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: How right-wing social media took false claims about Haitians eating pets to the debate