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.
“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)
She actually said:
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.
None of that means you can’t be racist.
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.
The evidence that shes racist is the incredibly racist post she made.
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.
There is evidence of her being a racist piece of shit though.
https://lemmy.ca/post/28915538/11651615
I’ve rephrased this comment more explicitly and concretely here. Feel free to read through the rest of that thread. I’d rather not repeat myself unless you have something new to add.
You’re trying to save face in the same way this racist piece of shit is trying to save face: badly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I do consider how well society functions, and I don’t think it is successful.
And so you’ll improve it by throwing around random accusations?
How is “the lady who made an extremely racist post online might be racist” a random accusation, exactly?
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.
Nah, someone who wasn’t racist would have known not to spread your crazy neighbor’s theories that are.
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.
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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.
Have you seen what she actually wrote, and if yes, can you share? I think we should set the actual message before casting judgement.
Alright, I found a screenshot of it posted on twitter. Can confirm that this is racist.
Have people been killed?
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.
And somehow it will make trump right instead of wrong, at least in his own mind.
Not yet, and I hope not. I’m worried this will (figuratively) explode into something like the recent UK protests/riots.
ftfy