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 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.

  • cybervseas@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1107·
    6 months ago

    “I didn’t mean to be a terrible racist person and (possibly) get people killed. I just wanted to be casually racist.”

    Edit: added (possibly)

    • protist@mander.xyzEnglish
      519·
      6 months ago

      She actually said:

      “I’m not a racist,” she said through heavy emotion, adding that her daughter is half Black and she herself is mixed race and a member of the LGBTQ community. “Everybody seems to be turning it into that, and that was not my intent.”

      Lee said she pulled her daughter out of school and is now worried about her safety with so much attention on her family. She is also concerned for the safety of the Haitian community, which she said she did not intend to villainize en masse.

      “I feel for the Haitian community,” she said. “If I was in the Haitians’ position, I’d be terrified, too, worried that somebody’s going to come after me because they think I’m hurting something that they love and that, again, that’s not what I was trying to do.”

      These aren’t the words of some MAGA devotee, she seems pretty genuine on this and I don’t see any reason not to believe her. I instead blame those who have purposefully worsened and spread this rumor for racist ends. Imagine if you made an offhand post on Lemmy that inadvertently spun up a rumor that reached a fucking presidential.debate, I bet you’d be caught pretty off guard by that.

      • almar_quigley@lemmy.world
        216·
        6 months ago

        Sorry but are you excusing a person who literally made up the racist shit for no reason just because her apology didn’t sound republican to you and other people blew her lie up further than she “claims” to have not wanted it to be?

        That’s like sorry I set this building on fire, I was just trying to burn this one desk but didn’t mean for it to spread and kill a bunch of innocent people.

    • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
      72·
      6 months ago

      “I didn’t (allegedly) mean to be a terrible racist person and (possibly) get people killed. I just (allegedly) wanted to be casually racist.”

      ftfy

      • cybervseas@lemmy.worldEnglish
        13·
        6 months ago

        Not yet, and I hope not. I’m worried this will (figuratively) explode into something like the recent UK protests/riots.