Anatomy of a racist smear: How false claims of pet-eating immigrants caught on
[...] The origin of the unfounded claim seems to be a private Facebook group called “Springfield Ohio Crime and Information,” according to NewsGuard, an apolitical fact-checking organization launched in 2018 by journalist Steven Brill and news executive Gordon Crovitz.
A screenshot of a post to the group circulated widely, with an unnamed person claiming that the cat of a friend’s daughter had been hung “from a branch, like you’d do a deer for butchering, & they were carving it up to eat,” referring to a house where Haitian immigrants lived. “They have been doing it at snyder park with the ducks and geese, as I was told that last bit by Rangers & police.”
[...]
Nevertheless, some social media users pointed to a video of a Black
woman being arrested for reportedly killing and eating a cat in a driveway. Right-wing commentator Ian Miles Cheong posted the video to X on Aug. 21. After another X user responded by asking if drugs were involved in the incident, Cheong replied on Saturday: “Worse. Haitians.”
That August incident was not filmed in Springfield but Canton, Ohio, and featured a woman who “has no known connection to Haiti or any other foreign country,” according to the Canton Repository newspaper. A representative from the Canton police department wrote in an email that the woman “is a US citizen that was born in Canton, Ohio. We would have no additional comment at this time.”