We came across posts on the following topic on the social media platform X and TikTok:
The social media posts made reference to president-elect of the US Trump and his presidential election campaign releasing an official statement criticising New York authorities for putting ‘more effort in finding an (sic) eliminating a squirrel, who was innocent by all accounts, than they do to control the unchecked illegal immigrants who have flooded their state’.
Going Peanuts
We conducted a search on the squirrel and found several social media posts and media reports referring to Peanut the squirrel (also spelt as P’Nut), a pet belonging to Mark and Daniela Longo, a couple living in New York.
News reports indicated that on 30 October, Peanut, along with Fred the raccoon, another of the Longo’s pets, was seized and euthanised by New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) agents. The seizure was said to be the result of ‘anonymous complaints’, as it is illegal to house wild animals considered wildlife without a special permit. Longo, who had cared for the squirrel for seven years after it was orphaned, said that he was in the process of applying for one.
During the investigation and seizure of the animals, Peanut bit a person involved with the investigations, leading to DEC agents euthanising both animals to test for rabies.
Following the incident, the Longos proceeded to make several social media posts and give several interviews denouncing what they considered to be an emphatic example of government overreach.
In the next few days, Peanut came to be mourned on rightwing media, with several political figures publicly invoking the squirrel’s untimely death as indicative of government authorities’—and by extension the Democratic Party’s—misplaced priorities and disregard for the liberty of their supporters.
Marjory Taylor Greene, a congresswoman from Georgia, likened the fate of the squirrel to that of a woman from the state of Georgia who had been killed by a Venezuelan man who had once resided in New York.
Elon Musk also posted about the squirrel in a post on X, while the Trump campaign posted a slideshow on TikTok claiming that the Peanut had been ‘needlessly murdered by Democrat bureaucrats’ and promising to ‘avenge’ the rodent at the ballot box. Many of these posts appear to have been created and uploaded on the same day, on 3 November.
The Nutty Statement
Amid the flurry of the posts and statements among rightwing figures, a statement that appeared to be from the Trump presidential campaign on social media, appearing to first appear on Facebook and then circulating on X and other platforms.
Bearing the header of the Trump campaign, the statement claimed that if Peanut told the DEC agents that he was from Mexico, ‘they would have sent him on his way and given him a hotel room and a $500 gift card to Buddy Squirrel’.
At the same time, artificially generated video of Trump speaking about Peanut began appearing in social media posts.
A keyword search of this statement, however, revealed that there was no such statement from the campaign, and that the statement was likely to be an altered image from an original statement.
Fact-checks by Politifact, USA Today and CheckYourFact revealed that no such statements had been published on the website of the campaign, and campaign spokesmen confirmed to multiple media outlets that the statement was fake.
Despite the statement being false, its convincing appearance contributed to its virality, in combination with its republication by some news outlets that were duped amid the flood of media statements on the issue.
The news outlet Mediaite published the statement attributed to Trump, and later issued a correction recognising that it had been found to be fake. By this point, however, the Mediaite article link was being included in social media posts by users as evidence for the authenticity of the statement.
To add to the confusion, the Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, used language similar to that in the fake statement at a 3 November rally in North Carolina.
“The same government that doesn’t care about hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant criminals coming into our country, doesn’t want us to have pets,” Vance told the crowd.
Information Overload
Our search revealed that the Trump campaign statement criticising New York authorities for targeting Peanut the squirrel instead of illegal immigrants is therefore false, though several such authentic statements exist that were issued by his Trump’s allies and associates.
Peanut’s story and the false statement represents an example of information overload, where a broad campaign on social and traditional media utilising altered or artificially generated media can confuse the audience as to the authenticity of public statements, while distracting from the intentions driving the campaigns.
