The woman behind an early Facebook post that helped spark baseless rumors about Haitians eating pets told NBC News that she feels for the immigrant community.
The woman behind an early Facebook post spreading a harmful and baseless claim about Haitian immigrants eating local pets that helped thrust a small Ohio city into the national spotlight says she had no firsthand knowledge of any such incident and is now filled with regret and fear as a result of the ensuing fallout.
“It just exploded into something I didn’t mean to happen,” Erika Lee, a Springfield resident, told NBC News on Friday.
Lee recently posted on Facebook about a neighbor’s cat that went missing, adding that the neighbor told Lee she thought the cat was the victim of an attack by her Haitian neighbors.
Newsguard, a media watchdog that monitors for misinformation online, found that Lee had been among the first people to publish a post to social media about the rumor, screenshots of which circulated online. The neighbor, Kimberly Newton, said she heard about the attack from a third party, NewsGuard reported.
This is the kind of outrage response that is ruining society. Everyone gossips and it sounds like she was repeating something she heard elsewhere instead of making it up on the spot.
The blame for the violence against immigrants falls squarely on the shoulders of Dotard Dump for taking a single soundbite (probably out of context) and blasting it to the world and directly inti the brains of his nazi followers. This lady wasn’t orchestrating a disinformation campaign, she was victim to one.
If one person told Adolph one time that “Juden sind schlect” would you seriously blame them for the entire holocaust?
I do think there’s a lesson here about the dangers of social media, disinformation, and republicans though.