A few weeks ago, I discussed the mostly innocent spreading of misinformation through jokes and satire. A person on Mastodon said I should have called them lies, but a lie means intent to deceive. A lot of widespread claims start without malice. That seems to have been the case with the story of Haitian immigrants stealing and eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio. It now appears to have started with a Facebook post that posted a garbled version of a neighbor’s claim without expecting anything significant to come of it. Others picked it up, embellishing it from vague stories they’d heard or from their imagination. Another source was claims of immigrants poaching on waterfowl, which may or may not have been true but is in a far different category from killing pets.

You can look up that story by searching for an NBC News piece titled “‘It just exploded’: Springfield woman claims she never meant to spark false rumors about Haitians.” I’m not linking to it because it gives the names of the person who made the post and the neighbor who was the subject of it. They must be going through more than they deserve, and I don’t want to add to it. Here’s the important part with the names redacted:

[A] 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.
…
[The neighbor] told Newsguard that [A]’s Facebook post misstated her story, and that the owner of the missing cat was “an acquaintance of a friend” rather than her daughter’s friend. [Neighbor] could not be reached for comment.

[A] said she had no idea the post would become part of a rumor mill that would spiral into the national consciousness. She has since deleted the Facebook post.

Others have had dishonest motives in spreading the claim. When Trump repeated it in the presidential debate, we can be sure he was lying. He isn’t strong on analytical skills, but he’s an expert at audience manipulation, and he knew exactly what he wanted to achieve with that rant. J. D. Vance has unapologetically admitted to lying. Several articles have claimed that “racism” is the full explanation of the rumor. It’s more complicated than that, with some people not intending anything malicious and others exploiting the stories for political gain. I’m sure some people were willing to believe them because Haitians look different, but it’s not the whole story.

In the aria “La Calunnia” in The Barber of Seville, Basilio explains how it works. A calumny starts “piano piano” and increases “poco a poco” until it’s like a cannon shot. In the case he sings about, that’s the intent, but it doesn’t have to be.

Be careful what claims you post on the Internet. You don’t know who may read them and what they’ll do with them. Be equally careful in boosting what you read. People don’t have to be lying to disseminate misinformation; they may be misinformed or confused. The bigger your audience is, the more careful you have to be.

Update: Just a few minutes ago, I posted a link to this article to Bluesky, and several people quickly “liked” it, one literally in about a second. However, at the moment my WordPress stats show no one has yet clicked on that Bluesky link. Are they trying to prove or mock my point?