By David Ingram -
NBC News
As Haiti faces an extreme political and social crisis amid a wave of intense violence, tech billionaire Elon Musk and right-wing online commentators are weaponizing
unverified allegations
of cannibalism arising from the conflict to promote a political agenda about immigration.
Musk and conservative influencers have spread the message to millions of people,
falsely accusing
Haitian migrants of cannibalism, who are experiencing deep uncertainty about the future of their country and their families there.
The claims are getting tens of millions of views on social network X, where false or misleading information has spread since Musk bought the app and drastically reduced content moderation.
Many of the people spreading these sensational claims are premium subscribers to X, meaning their content can generate revenue through advertising sales.
Accusations of widespread cannibalism are based on what experts said was a likely intimidation tactic by select gang members: in some videos —
the most prominent examples are at least two years old
and do not correspond to the current situation that Haiti lives in—you can see alleged members of violent gangs in the Caribbean country who appear to bite human flesh.
But
there is no evidence that this practice is widespread
among the Haitian population.
Experts said these videos are likely part of propaganda campaigns designed to scare rivals and terrorize local Haitians rather than being a reflection of common or normalized behavior.
An ancient armed group was called the “Cannibal Army.”
Ian Miles Cheong, a right-wing commentator, helped start the frenzy last week on X, writing that there were “gangs of cannibals in Haiti who kidnap and eat people.”
[A terrified mother hides in a Haitian church with her children and tries to survive violence and hunger]
“Let's remember that these people are now illegally entering the United States en masse,” he continued, making no distinction between the most notorious Haitian gang members and those trying to flee them.
She offered no evidence
to support the claim that alleged cannibal immigrants are entering the United States en masse.
Cheong defended his posts in response to questions from NBC News, citing a video that appears to show someone eating part of a leg and noting the gang name 'Cannibal Army.'
Another high-profile expert, right-wing content creator Tim Pool, cited unverified allegations of Haitian cannibalism as proof that former President Donald Trump was justified in opposing immigration from Haiti.
Trump referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” during a meeting in 2018, NBC News reported.
Pool did not respond to a request for comment or additional evidence.
The wave of social media posts related to cannibalism is an insult to Haitians and Haitian-Americans, said Chris Nestor, moderator of the r/Haiti message board on Reddit and a lawyer in Washington, D.C., whose parents were Haitian immigrants. .
“An entire population is blamed for what some psychopathic gang members are doing,” Néstor said in a telephone interview.
“It's racist.
"It's dehumanizing."
Nestor, who is also a U.S. Army reservist, said the cruelty of Haitian armed groups, if anything, strengthens the case for accepting Haitian refugees, who he claims are innocent.
[USA. sends soldiers to Haiti to protect its embassy from gangs and evacuates non-essential personnel]
False claims
are
spreading while Haiti is in the midst of a real emergency.
Armed groups that had been fighting each other have now formed an alliance against the Government, attacking police stations, airports and prisons, from which they have freed thousands of inmates.
Haitian Prime Minister Ariel Henry is leaving office and has been unable to return to the country after traveling abroad.
The elected president of Haiti was assassinated two years ago.
Murder, hunger and displacement are widespread, according to the UN.
The bodies are often left to decompose in the Caribbean heat or burned because there is no one to remove them, The Washington Post reported Saturday from the capital, Port-au-Prince.
A person runs to escape burning tires as people protest against Prime Minister Ariel Henry to demand his resignation, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, February 6, 2024. Odelyn Joseph / AP file
The cruelty of Haitian gang leaders is not in dispute, nor is the widespread killing in the country during a years-long political crisis, but
false claims
about widespread cannibalism go much further in attempting to paint the entire nation. Caribbean as barbaric.
The State Department
has not received any credible reports of cannibalism in Haiti
, a spokesperson said Tuesday.
Doctors Without Borders said
they had also seen no evidence
of cannibalism in the country, and Human Rights Watch said it had no information on the issue.
Marlene Daut, a professor of French and African diaspora studies at Yale University, said American and European powers began spreading unfounded stories of cannibalism in Haiti around the time the country's slaves overthrew French colonizers and declared independence in 1804. The effect has been to represent Haiti as irredeemable.
“It is very disturbing that Elon Musk repeats these absurd ideas that, in fact, have a long history,” he wrote in an email.
The Haitian revolution that culminated in 1804 was the most successful slave revolt in modern history.
It made Haiti the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere after the United States and the first black-majority nation in the Americas.
Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has tweeted several times about alleged Haitian cannibalism since Saturday night.
“Civilization is fragile,” he posted in response to a user who was talking about a gang cannibalism video.
Musk shared a video by far-right commentator Matt Walsh about “cannibalistic hordes” of Haitians potentially migrating to the United States, and as of Tuesday night it had received more than 10 million views.
Musk has also boosted some of Cheong's posts about alleged Haitian cannibalism with replies and liking
them
.
Representatives for Musk and Walsh did not respond to requests for comment.
[This was the massive escape of prisoners in the largest prison in Haiti]
After NBC News initially published this article, Musk responded in a post on X. He said he wants to “screen immigrants for possible homicidal tendencies and cannibalism.”
Musk's decision about what to discuss online can have a big impact.
He has one of the biggest megaphones on social media, with 176.1 million followers on X, and, as one of the richest people in the world, frequently meets with heads of state and other political leaders, including Trump.
The claims shared by Musk have now traveled all over the Internet.
On Reddit, moderators of the r/Haiti message board imposed a new rule to limit discussion of cannibalism after what they said was a rise in racist posts that capitalized on a long history of discrimination against Haitians.
A Reddit spokesperson said the platform was removing some posts related to cannibalism under its content policy, but generally left legitimate news articles.
Dom Lucre, a Tennessee-based X user who has become known for sharing misleading information, tweeted one of the unverified videos on Sunday, describing it as “breaking news,” although the video has been online since minus November 2021. He later deleted the video, but his post had 21 million views as of Tuesday, according to public view counts on X. Lucre in an email declined an interview request.
Robert Bunker, a counterterrorism researcher and former professor at the U.S. Army War College, said the videos purportedly showing Haitian gang members reminded him of similar videos that drug cartels distributed in Mexico as a form of psychological warfare and intimidation.
He said the idea behind those videos is that: “They're trying to look like crazy people, because no one wants to mess with crazy people.”
Anyone who accepts the videos at face value is falling into the intimidation tactic, she said.
NBC News has not been able to verify that any of the videos are authentic.
Several of the most shared videos associated with the claims
have been online for two years or more
.
Two of Britain's tabloid newspapers helped fuel accusations of cannibalism.
On March 5, the American website The Express reported that “cannibalism has been witnessed on the streets.”
The article quoted an anonymous “journalist on the ground” who said that “we have seen images of gang leaders eating people they have killed.”
An affiliated British tabloid, The Star, repeated the claim in an article and accompanying headline without adding evidence or verifying the claim.
Screenshots of The Star's headline have now gone viral on X without providing context.
Both tabloids are owned by London-based media company Reach.
The company did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.
The two newspapers are among the least trustworthy in the UK
, according to a YouGov survey last year.
The Star ranked last out of 32 media outlets in the survey, rating it 3% trustworthy, while The Express ranked 25th, at 8% trustworthy.
The nickname of Haiti's top gang leader has contributed to speculation about cannibalism and easy jokes on social media.
Jimmy Chérizier, known by the alias
Barbecue
, is a former police officer and spokesperson for the alliance of Haiti's main armed groups.
In 2019, as Chérizier was rising to power, he told The Associated Press that he received the nickname
Barbecue
as a child because his mother was a street vendor who sold fried chicken;
Not, as others said at the time, because they accused him of setting people on fire.
He has since been sanctioned by the British and Canadian governments for alleged human rights violations.
Now, some people on social media have reinterpreted the nickname as a reference to cannibalism,
despite a lack of evidence
.
Bunker, the counterterrorism investigator, said he believed Chérizier has little reason to deny the claim now because it increases his influence.
Laurent Dubois, a historian at the University of Virginia who specializes in Haiti, said American society developed a fantasy view of Haiti while U.S. forces occupied it between 1915 and 1934. He noted that U.S. forces were accused of committing atrocities during the occupation which prompted a congressional investigation and the need for a story to cover up and justify the abuses.
“Most people in the United States do not know the history of that occupation, but they did inherit many of the stereotypes that were popularized during that period.
And every time Haiti appears in the news, many of those images are recirculated,” Dubois wrote in an email.
“There is probably no country in the world to which more misrepresentations have been projected than Haiti,” he wrote.