CNN
The Republican nominee for president went on live TV and presented an unhinged, debunked Facebook rumor as fact. When corrected (several times) by a moderator, Donald Trump doubled down: “The people on television say their dog was eaten by the people that went there.”

“They’re eating the dogs,” quickly became a punchline among commentators who understand that the whole story about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets in Ohio was a lie, rooted in a well-established racist history.

It’s the kind of outrage-bait that, while disgusting, is hardly unexpected on Facebook these days.

But the claim’s elevation to the presidential debate stage underscores a grim reality about the internet in 2024: Misinformation is everywhere, platforms are giving up on moderation and AI is making it all worse.

Trump’s debate performance “was like a 4chan post come to life,” said CNN’s Jake Tapper.

It’s an apt analogy.

4chan, once an innocuous online message board for anime enthusiasts in the early 2000s, is a prime example of what happens when you remove the guardrails from a social media site, with only a handful of community members regulating it. Over the years, 4chan has become a cesspool of violence, conspiracy theories and its own particular brand of “edgelord white supremacy,” as the Verge put it.

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