Smear

 Washington Post: Anatomy of a racist smear: How false claims of pet-eating immigrants caught on - How an anti-immigrant rumor spread from a random Facebook post to leadership of the Republican Party and the biggest influencers on social media so quickly. By Sarah Ellison and Jeremy B. Merrill

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.