A strange and, by most accounts, unexpected thing happened during Tuesday night’s debate between VP Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump. Amid the back-and-forth discussions about the economy, foreign policy, and abortion rights, Trump repeated the bizarre claim that recently-arrived immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, have been capturing and eating other people’s pets.
When responding to a question from moderator David Muir about his immigration policy, and his successful attempts to kill a proposed border security bill earlier this year, Trump brought up the rumors. “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs… the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating– they’re eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump alleged.
Even before the debate had started, these claims had been widely debunked. Though Springfield really has seen a significant increase in its Haitian immigrant population – swelling from 15,000 to around 20,000 over the last few years – local officials have repeatedly denied salacious stories about pet consumption. In a statement, the Springfield Police confirmed “there have been no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured, or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.” NPR likewise examined the racist history of these kinds of rumors during political campaigns throughout America’s history, noting that similar, fake stories about stealing and eating cats and dogs were once ascribed to Asian immigrants rather than those from Haiti.
But just as notable as the ugliness of these rumors are their source. Trump may have heard the stories from his own VP nominee – Ohio Sen. JD Vance – who has been repeating them throughout the week, and indeed encouraged his own followers to spread them just hours before the debate. But Vance did not invent the stories himself. He almost certainly saw them first on social media.
PolitiFact suggests that the latest wave of “immigrants eating pets” anecdotes originated with a September 6 post from Facebook, which reported that “ducks and pets” are disappearing from Springfield after more Haitians started moving into the area. Notably, the post was flagged by Meta’s latest attempt to clamp down on misinformation, but this did not limit the story’s spread. It’s the latest indication that these platforms are utterly ill-equipped to discern truth for fiction, nor to stop the spread of falsehoods even after they’re identified.
Other tall tales about pet-eating in Ohio were inspired by this Reddit post, featuring a photo of a Black American walking in Columbus, Ohio, holding a goose. Though it’s unknown whether or not the man is Haitian, and eating goose is a widely accepted practice throughout the West (especially if you are Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas morning), the image nonetheless fueled widespread speculation about what food sources Ohio immigrants were consuming.
There’s also widely shared bodycam footage from Canton, Ohio, first recorded in mid-August, depicting a woman being arrested for animal cruelty. The suspect, Allexis T. Ferrell, is genuinely accused of killing and eating a cat. However, she’s an American with no connection whatsoever to Haiti. Nonetheless, the video was picked up on YouTube and other platforms and purposefully mislabeled to identify Ferrell as a Haitian immigrant, adding more fuel to the social media inferno.
By this point, widely followed right-wing commentators like Charlie Kirk and Elon Musk started sharing the stories, they found their way into JD Vance’s feed, and finally wound up in the mouth of a presidential candidate during a nationally televised debate.
This wasn’t even an isolated incident. During the same response, Trump also name-checked Aurora, Colorado, claiming that criminal immigrants “are taking over the towns, they are taking over the buildings, they are going in violently.” This was a reference to a different trending story on social media from the last few weeks, which claimed that gang members from Venezuela were taking over Colorado apartment complexes, kicking managers out of their own buildings and extorting money from residents. In truth, though the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua does operate in the Denver area, their actual presence is relatively small, and descriptions of gangs essentially taking over large areas or towns are exaggerated.
The idea that internet creators, digital media correspondents, and online influencers are impacting our elections is nothing new, and has been widely discussed – even here in Passionfruit – over the last few election cycles. But typically, creator engagement has been discussed in terms of punditry and coverage. Influencers and creators matter because they have massive audiences of young voters, which in turn grants them more access to candidates, politicians, and lawmakers than ever before.
But notably, now we’re starting to see the messaging move in the opposite direction. Creators are not just observing, analyzing and commenting on the presidential race. They’re steering and guiding campaigns themselves. Influencers aren’t just influencing their audiences, they’re influencing the candidates, who in a very meaningful way, are now a part of their audiences.
It’s not just limited to Republicans, either. Kamala Harris’ vice presidential nominee, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, was a relative unknown on the national stage at the start of 2024. Many, if not MOST, Americans first became aware of Gov. Walz when he went viral on social media for referring to Sen. Vance as “just weird” on MSNBC.
It wasn’t long before other Democrats – within the Party itself, in the media, and among everyday voters – picked up and ran with the same messaging. Reuters suggests that the “weird” formulation was particularly important and meaningful to younger Americans – who drive the online conversation – as it suggests a novel, alternate approach to Trumpism. Rather than viewing Trump and Vance as a terrifying threat to democracy, the “weird” argument reframes them as fundamentally unserious. Something to be mocked rather than feared.
The Harris Campaign adopted “they’re weird” as a rallying cry, even before selecting Walz as Harris’ running mate. Was the “weird” video going viral the reason that Harris picked Walz, instead of other top contenders like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, as Axios suggests? That such a claim is even POSSIBLE highlights the key, central importance of the viral internet, meme culture, and social media to not just interpret but drive American elections. (Is this actually the reason why Republican activist Elon Musk purchased Twitter in the first place, and transformed it into X? Who can say.)
This was, on some levels, likely inevitable. More Americans than ever get their news from internet sources, including social media apps like Twitter/X and TikTok, so it naturally follows that viral stories from these platforms find their way to mainstream attention alongside the more conventional news-gathering from sources like CNN, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and CBS News.
But this trend also, clearly, poses stark new challenges to accuracy and fairness in reporting. Many social media users and commentators lack meaningful editorial oversight, are not doing their own fact-checking, and lack vital experience in reporting the news and identifying misinformation themselves. In many cases, non-professional or self-appointed pundits and political writers have personal interests and agendas separate from a desire to inform the public with the best available information.
That’s not to say mainstream journalists don’t have biases of their own, or that major publications don’t have their own outlooks and editorial perspectives. But regardless of whether CNN leans right or left, there are still meaningful expectations – and even legal regulations – guiding their coverage, and ensuring that they don’t knowingly publish falsehoods as fact. Just last year, Fox News was ordered to pay $800 million to Dominion Voting Systems for posting false reports about the 2020 presidential election. An infrastructure does exist, however questionable or deficient, for holding the mainstream media back from knowingly spreading lies. No such laws or standards regulate YouTube commentary or TikTok posts or Reddit threads. It’s a total free-for-all all over there, with the optimistic hope that a cacophony of different oppositional voices will ultimately land on the truth.
Earlier this month, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) indicted two Russians who work for the state-run media organization Russia Today (RT). They’re accused of covertly funding the US-based platform and publisher Tenet Media, which features political commentary from wildly popular internet creators like Tim Pool, Laura Southern, Dave Rubin, and Benny Johnson. DOJ suggests that only Tenet’s leadership – Laura Chen and Liam Donovan – were aware of the Russian connection, but that’s hardly comforting. That suggests Pool, Johnson, and the other commentators were receiving editorial direction along with massive paychecks ($400,000 per month, for four videos, by some accounts) from a foreign government without their knowledge. They were inserting big ideas into the discourse, and themselves likely didn’t know the story’s origin point. (Most of them have continued offering a non-stop stream of political commentary following the indictment. Who do they work for now? Do they know? Johnson’s Twitter bio reads “I make internet,” which is hardly helpful on this score.)
A scenario in which bad actors or foreign governments can spend money to influence online discourse about a topic, and then that online discourse filters into the highest levels of power, could prove very dangerous. It’s our latest reminder that being a creator is fun and exciting but also carries with it a tremendous burden of responsibility, especially once you’ve started building up a real following and audience. The internet’s megaphone just gets louder and louder all the time, without any real guarantees that the quality or accuracy of its messaging will improve. It’s going to be up to the community to police itself, apparently, as the government now looks to follow the internet’s lead.
