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
    1758·
    2 个月前

    “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
      8110·
      2 个月前

      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.

      • treadful@lemmy.zipEnglish
        614·
        2 个月前

        “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.”

        None of that means you can’t be racist.

        • howrar@lemmy.ca
          1810·
          2 个月前

          It certainly doesn’t. But in the absence of evidence in either direction, I think it’s most reasonable to not assume the worst of people.

            • howrar@lemmy.ca
              13·
              2 个月前

              Evidence which wasn’t available to the participants of the conversation at the time. With only what we see in the article, there’s no reason to believe that this post she made was racist.

          • Samvega@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            53·
            2 个月前

            But in the absence of evidence in either direction, I think it’s most reasonable to not assume the worst of people.

            The human world is based on purposefully creating and maintaining inequality to enable exploitation. This is empirically verifiable. It is therefore reasonable to assume that most humans do not act based on morality, but instead out of convenience and/or apathy.

            Get back to me when there are no hungry children, then I will be ready to reassess the evidence.

            • howrar@lemmy.ca
              42·
              2 个月前

              You can believe what you want about human nature, but consider how well society would function if it was acceptable to make baseless accusations and act on them as if they were facts.

                • howrar@lemmy.ca
                  11·
                  2 个月前

                  And so you’ll improve it by throwing around random accusations?

                  • flicker@lemmy.world
                    3·
                    2 个月前

                    How is “the lady who made an extremely racist post online might be racist” a random accusation, exactly?

                  • Samvega@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
                    1·
                    2 个月前

                    And so you’ll improve it by throwing around random accusations?

                    Looking back on my two previous posts in this thread, I have not accused any individual of anything. Nor do I think I can improve a human world specifically designed to hurt humans all by myself. All I can do is refrain from hurting others - this is not an action which, by itself, changes the moral behaviour of the majority.

                    You, in fact, are the one throwing an accusation. You might be doing this, ironically, out of a desire to improve the world. Feel free to ask me towards the end of the lifespan whether I have noticed a difference due to your efforts.

              • redisdead@lemmy.world
                1·
                2 个月前

                You’re trying to save face in the same way this racist piece of shit is trying to save face: badly.

                • howrar@lemmy.ca
                  11·
                  2 个月前

                  Your comment is a great example of the kind of biases I’m telling everyone to avoid. You misunderstood my initial message, then decided to cling on to that interpretation despite clarifications.

                  In any case, if you have feedback (e.g. what made the comment unclear, or how you interpreted it), I’d appreciate hearing about it so I can improve my writing. I’m not always aware of the hidden meanings non-autistic people pull out of words that weren’t intended to have any.

                  • redisdead@lemmy.world
                    1·
                    2 个月前

                    I understood your message

                    Blah blah blah we don’t know she’s a racist because weh weh weh random bullshit about missing context.

                    Yes we do. She’s a racist shitbag. The context is her being a racist shitbag writing a racist shitbag post on social media. The post has been displayed on various news sources and visible to anyone with a passing interest in the subject.

                    Her only remorse is that her casual racism turned out to be exposed to the public and the racist in chief is putting the spotlight on her racist shitbaggery.

      • andyburke@fedia.io
        549·
        2 个月前

        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.

        Nah, someone who wasn’t racist would have known not to spread your crazy neighbor’s theories that are.

        • Rhaedas@fedia.io
          151·
          2 个月前

          If she had left off the Haitian part, it would just be typical crazy Nextdoor stuff. That she felt that had to be included suggests something. Maybe not MAGA level, but there’s some specifics not being said. Hell, she may not even consider herself biased, yet she sees those Haitians as different enough to single them out.

      • almar_quigley@lemmy.world
        3211·
        2 个月前

        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.

        • howrar@lemmy.ca
          95·
          2 个月前

          Have you seen what she actually wrote, and if yes, can you share? I think we should set the actual message before casting judgement.

      • Rhaedas@fedia.io
        261·
        2 个月前

        We shouldn’t wait until it gets to that point. Look at the past, plenty of racism examples to work from that became violent. What really makes it worse is that Trump, Vance, and others are doubling down on the mistake, fanning flames that should have just been a one day “that’s stupid”. They want violence, it helps their cause, excites their base.

      • cybervseas@lemmy.worldEnglish
        18·
        2 个月前

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

    • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world
      95·
      2 个月前

      “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