The warning about “our beloved pets” appeared for the first time in early September, in a post on a community Facebook page called Springfield Ohio Crime and Information.

The post claimed a Springfield resident who had lost her pet cat arrived home from work one day to find Haitians butchering the animal in their front yard.

“They were carving it up to eat,” the post said.

The accusation was shocking, but, in at least one way, it was like any other post on any other neighborhood Facebook page. Someone heard a rumor and decided to share it. No evidence. No eyewitness. Just someone with a story to tell and an internet connection.

The Springfield page is a tiny outpost in a vast online world, so that might have been the end of it. But within days, the claim that Haitian migrants were eating pets in Springfield raced around the world, fueled mainly by right-wing influencers on the social media site X.

The rumor traveled from the private Facebook page with about 8,000 members where it first appeared, to a large, loosely connected network of...

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