On social media, people are using photos of animal abuse to delegitimize Black Lives Matter protests. But the credibility of these claims is questionable at best.
As protests gripped Kenosha, Wisconsin following the police shooting
that left Jacob Blake paralyzed, another story broke out almost
immediately. Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, drove from Illinois to Wisconsin
with a rifle and allegedly shot three protestors, killing two and
injuring one.
Social media exploded. Stories were being shared everywhere. Some
people expressed their shock over the deaths. Others expressed
grief. But something else was also happening.
Under a Facebook post dated August 29, describing the reaction of
Kenosha Police Chief Daniel Miskinis, Facebook user Laura Mills
posted a photo and commented, “Peaceful protestor chokes puppy…….He
should have been one of the three!”
This post is now private. The screenshot was taken on August 29,
2020.
Shocked, another user Kristy Johnson replied asking, “So the kid
should have murdered more people?”
Standing her ground, Mills wrote, “A Child molester, drug dealer,
and Animal Abuser…hell yes!”
A reverse image search on Google revealed that the photograph Mills
shared was doctored. Furthermore, it led to additional stories that
debunk claims that the man in the photograph killed the dog. Perhaps
most bizarre of all is the fact that Mills had determined, based on
no evidence whatsoever, that the man had both molested children and
sold drugs.
In fact, Mills decided that not only was an unrelated Black
man—hundreds of miles away from Wisconsin altogether—guilty of
several crimes, he deserved summary execution at the hands of an
armed 17-year-old.
This story doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s part of a disturbing
trend.
People are invalidating Black opposition to state violence by using
stories of animal abuse to delegitimize protests. And the
truthfulness of some stories is questionable at best. In this
universe, where urban legend is as good as verification, rumor
becomes fact.
An image of a police horse allegedly injured by a protester surfaced
in late May. Absent of any context, social media users have placed
this horse all over the United States from Ohio to Texas. The
narrative chosen depends on who is telling the tale. The only
constant seems to be that the innocent horse was violently attacked
by people described as everything from leftist racists to human
garbage.
It doesn’t much seem to matter whether or not horses are being
forced into service at the hands of the state. It only matters that
an allegation can be made that an animal was injured by the
protestors.
Facebook user Mitzi Ocean shared a story from the website Newspunch,
about a raccoon who was beaten to death by a group of men. She
wrote, “That BLM and their supporters have a number of times
attacked and even killed both human and animal, prove they have no
regard for life and that fact delegitimizes them. The Peaceful Great
Activists like Dr. Martin Luther King jr. and Gandhi would be
appalled. Violence begets violence. They loose [sic] their right to
the ‘Victim’ card if they themselves become the murderers of the
innocent!!”
On their own merit, Ocean’s words don’t really make sense. State
violence against Black people isn’t nullified by individual acts of
Black violence against animals any more than gendered violence is
mitigated by homophobia. Groups can (and do) occupy multiple
identities. It would be equally absurd to argue that white women
shouldn’t have voting rights because some white women are racist.
Having started as a decentralized organization in 2013, popularized
by the kneeling of athletes like Colin Kaepernick, it’s hard to
argue that Black Lives Matter (BLM) has not existed as an overall
peaceful movement for years, with a sharp spike in media attention
following the death of George Floyd in May 2020.
But whether protests are peaceful or violent is irrelevant. As the
Washington Post points out, public perception is what matters. And
one of the easiest ways to demonize a group is to play on the media
trope that bad people abuse animals.
The decentralization of BLM is also very important to observe here.
When right-of-center websites framing themselves as alternative news
sources infiltrate the social media apparatus with stories of
individual acts of animal abuse, decentralization makes it much
easier to use isolated acts interchangeably with the whole
‘organization.’
And the use of animals as victims is extremely intentional. Dr.
Corey Wrenn, a sociologist at the University of Kent, said:
Nonhuman animals play a symbolic role in our anthropocentric
culture. Rather than view them as individuals and persons with their
own rights and interests, they become politicized weapons for
advancing ideologies of domination. Psychological research supports
that those with more conservative/right-leaning value systems are
far less likely to support vegetarianism, veganism, or animal
rights. Thus, when the right campaigns against social justice causes
on grounds of animal welfare, we have reason to be suspicious as to
their underlying strategy.
Wrenn’s point is proven over and over again. If society had
consistent attitudes about animal abuse, these types of
misinformation campaigns would be much more difficult to politicize.
Every single person who eats a hamburger would be forced to
reevaluate their position. But societal attitudes about animals are
completely subjective.
Some people might relegate stories like this to the periphery or
otherwise claim they’re unimportant. But it would be unwise to
discount them. It’s easy to assume that the goal of right-wing
propaganda is to get people to like all the same things that
right-wing extremists like. But that’s an unrefined view of the way
propaganda works. Radicalization is a process.
Sometimes the goal is to make people hate the same people you hate.
You don’t have to believe in right-wing extremism to think animal
abuse is unacceptable. And if you read an article from an unvetted
website that says Black people abuse animals, you might be convinced
to think that Black lives do not, in fact, matter. Not because you
hate Black people, but rather because your empathy was diminished by
people who instrumentalize your natural love for animals.
To the purveyors of disinformation, that’s a victory. Ask Ms. Mills
and Ms. Ocean.
Christopher is the director of social media for Peace Advocacy Network. He also sits on the Advisory Council for Encompass, co-founded VGN, and lectures at Columbia University on power, oppression, and privilege. Follow him at ChristopherSebastian.info.