Fake news and misinformation are surging amid the deadly Los Angeles wildfires, with right-wing social media accounts falsely accusing Black people of looting amid the devastation—igniting a fiery political debate on racial profiling as the death toll grew to 24 over the weekend.
The controversy erupted when The Chingon Conservative, a MAGA-inspired influencer with 49,000 followers, shared a video on Instagram showing several Black men moving furniture and valuables from a home threatened by flames — framing them as criminals and creating a false narrative out of whole cloth.
The edited video quickly went viral on the platform X, where numerous right-wing operatives eagerly shared it to push the racist narrative, only to later discover they had completely misjudged the situation.
Another angle of the same news clip, showing the same men moving furniture, also features the homeowner speaking with news crews about salvaging her belongings from the flames as they were being removed from her home. Yet, many blindly accepted the falsified story and ran with it, highlighting how easily discrimination spreads on social media through misinformation and unchecked biases.
Many were angered by the false allegations.
“Because they’re Black, they must be looting? This isn’t an honest mistake,” one person on X noted.
Another user said, “This type of f***king fake news spilling racist content should really be penalized and accounts permanently suspended. Poor family literally following...
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