If you’re on social media right now, you may not realize you’re being fed racist videos spreading misinformation about the 41 million Americans who get food stamps, or benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).
In many of these videos that appear to be generated by the artificial intelligence app Sora, people with SNAP benefits are being demonized as people defrauding the government.
Mostly Black women are seen loudly arguing with retail employees over declining payments on electronic benefit transfer (EBT) cards. Some are seen stealing from grocery stores.
In others, AI-generated Black women boast about being “set” because of the public assistance they receive due to their children with multiple fathers.
HuffPost reached out to OpenAI to ask if this kind of content violates the company’s standards for Sora-generated videos, but did not hear back. But even when these AI-generated videos are obviously fake, they are still making people watch and engage with these pernicious stereotypes.
“Free ride is over,” one top TikTok commenter states after an AI-generated video shows a Black woman having her EBT card declined.
“That’s why the government is taking [SNAP] away,” one commenter states under an AI clip uploaded to YouTube of a Black woman claiming to sell her SNAP benefits for profit.
That’s the appeal of racist online videos that blur the lines between fact and fiction to confirm people’s worst beliefs about people receiving public assistance.
What’s true or not about SNAP right now is already confusing people. The Trump administration recently backtracked an earlier plan to cut maximum SNAP benefits by 50%, and now said it will only be reduced this month by 35% in the latest chaos emanating from the government shutdown.
But viral videos of AI-generated SNAP stereotypes are a growing kind of misinformation that adds to this confusion. The “welfare queen” stereotype of poor people gaming the welfare system to become wealthy originated in the 1970s and 1980s, but it’s alive and well online today –– and having wide-ranging effects on us all.
What Happens When The “Welfare Queen” Stereotype Goes Viral
Here are the facts despite what these AI videos want you to think: According to the Pew Research Center, the majority of SNAP recipients are not Black, as these viral videos portray, but are actually white.
In 2020 data, white people accounted for 44.6% of adult SNAP recipients and 31.5% of child recipients in 2020. Meanwhile for adult recipients, 27% are Black, 21.9% are Latine, and Asian Americans make up just under 4%.
The welfare queen trope originated from a real person named Linda Taylor, a Chicago woman of ambiguous race who actually did bilk the government out of of thousands of dollars in the 1970s and had her misdeeds cited in Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign speeches.
“Taylor’s larger-than-life example created an indelible, inaccurate impression of public aid recipients,” writer Josh Levin noted in his biography about her life.
But in real life, SNAP fraud is quite rare. According to a 2018 report by the Congressional Research Service, for every 10,000 households participating in SNAP, about 14 had a SNAP recipient who got investigated and determined to have committed fraud.
“People are not making these big bucks on welfare, so this kind of fundamental premise is flawed,” said Tom Mould, an anthropology and folklore professor at Rollins College, who interviewed SNAP recipients for his book, “Overthrowing the Queen: Telling Stories of Welfare in America.”
“If you hear a story that feeds...racial animosity, you’re going to latch on to it.”
- Tom Mould, an anthropology and folklore professor at Rollins College
The reason this myth of “welfare queens” still persists today is because the idea of a Black woman “getting all this government aid that she does not need and then buying luxury items” is “a perfect storm for class resentment,” he said.
“If you hear a story that feeds that lingering, sometimes subconscious, sometimes very-conscious racial animosity, you’re going to latch on to it, and you’re going to share it, and you’re going to say, ‘Here’s proof. See, I knew it,’” Mould said.
Mould noted that one reason so many of the AI SNAP videos take place in a grocery store is that this is where many Americans suspect fraud happens, because people see strangers swipe EBT cards, and make judgments about what they buy.
“If we see somebody who doesn’t fit our idea of what poor looks like, and they’re using EBT, we assume fraud, and that’s just not the case,” he said.
What’s unsettling is how many people, even news organizations, are falling for what they see as the whole truth.
A recent Fox News article headline on these AI videos about SNAP initially read “SNAP Beneficiaries Threaten to Ransack Stores Over Government Shutdown,” according to the Internet Wayback Machine. The headline later became “AI Videos of SNAP Beneficiaries Complaining About Cuts Go Viral,” and a correction was added noting that some of the videos were AI. (Adding to more confusion: a TikTok linked in the article ended up including a real woman who is not AI. She was edited to say it was “the taxpayer’s responsibility to take care of my kid” without the context that she was kidding.)
It’s a reminder to be extra cautious about what you’re seeing and sharing because the circulation of these videos is not neutral.
The Best Action Is To Call Out What You See For What It Is
Watching looping videos of Black women in distress, over and over again, could also be warping our brains. Engaging with this content helps it spread the real stigma that some SNAP recipients feel, Mould said.
“It’s hard enough living on the poverty line, but then to know that your neighbors and your politicians and the people who are supposed to represent you think that you’re immoral and lazy and scum –– that’s terrible psychologically,” Mould said.
“The really damaging outcome is [the welfare queen stereotype] shapes our public policy,” Mould continued, citing Ange-Marie Hancock’s research on how welfare queen tropes about Black women informed the contentious 1996 welfare reform debate.
“Every time a state or federal representative tries to impose new laws on SNAP, they are always based on this assumption that people are buying junk food and steaks,” he said.
In worst cases, the stigma of SNAP keeps people from accessing the help they need, and then it’s “too late to get out of poverty with just the kind of meager assistance that SNAP and TANF and some of these programs provide,” Mould explained. “So the impacts, I would argue, [of the welfare queen trope] are incredibly large.“
That’s why one of the best ways to combat this viral AI slop might be to call out what you see and limit its reach.
Jeremy Carrasco, who is a go-to expert for spotting AI videos on social media, has debunked several of these videos that demonize people on public assistance. He considers them “rage bait” videos, because they are designed to get you “emotionally riled up” and comment. “So you actually have a role in its virality. And that’s basically how rage bait videos succeed,” he explained.
That’s why Carrasco is a fan of publicly shaming these accounts. He said he messaged a TikTok account behind “rage bait” videos of Black women complaining about EBT benefits being declined. He recalled messaging this user, “‘You are not going to get paid enough to make this worth it. The damage you’re doing is immeasurable.’ They didn’t respond, and then they deleted their video.”
“Just because it’s legal or not against a [platform’s] rule, doesn’t mean it’s moral,” Carrasco said. “That’s when it’s up to public shaming and public outcry to be like, ‘No, you shouldn’t do that.’”