A DOCTORED IMAGE that appears to show US Vice President Kamala Harris with rapper and producer Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs went viral after it was reposted by Donald Trump last week.
Trump shared the photoshopped image on his Truth Social platform but has since deleted it after it emerged it was a fake.
The image has clearly been edited to include Combs, and contains obvious signs of manipulation including issues around picture quality and the fact that the original can be found online.
Earlier this month, Combs was charged with racketeering, conspiracy and sex trafficking in New York and is currently detained in prison after being denied bail.
By seeking to link Harris to Combs, bad actors are feeding into a long-running conspiracy theory that seeks to smear certain politicians and celebrities as sex offenders.
Before it was doctored, the original image showed Harris, who is the Democratic nominee in the race for the White House, posing with TV presenter Montel Williams and his daughter Ashley Williams in May 2001.
The picture was taken while the three attended a charity event raising money for multiple sclerosis research in California. Harris and Montel Williams briefly dated at the time.
The original photo can be viewed on the Getty Images website here.
After Combs was charged by US law enforcement, the image was manipulated to include his face in place of Montel Williams’ and posted online.
As well as being shared on Truth Social, the doctored image has also been shared on X (formerly Twitter).
One account on the platform called Red Pilled USA posted it on 16 September with the caption: “The Diddy Client List goes all the way to the top.”
The X account has over 170,000 followers and the post received around 1.5 million views. It was also reposted more than 9,000 times.
It has received a “community note” (a feature on X that allows users to fact-check information) but it remains on the platform.
A note under the post reads: “This is a digitally altered photo of Diddy’s head on Montel Williams’ body.”
💥The Diddy Client List goes all the way to the top💥 pic.twitter.com/VyCpNrpbEr
— Red Pill USA (@Red_Pill_US) September 17, 2024
Despite this, the fake image is still being shared online. For example, it remains on the feed of a popular Republican group that boasts almost 80,000 followers.
Even without looking for other examples of the image online, there are some red flags that the doctored image with Combs has been manipulated.
The image quality of the doctored image changes depending on whose face the viewer looks at: Combs’ face is much clearer than those of Harris and Ashley Williams, while the lighting on Combs’ face is also different.
The person who edited the image to add Combs’ face also used a picture of the music mogul that appears to be much more recent than 2001.
This is how Combs looked back then, far younger than he appears in the doctored image:
Arguably the biggest giveaway that the image is fake is that the original can be found by doing a Google reverse image search of the image: this gives results for the photo featuring Williams, and information that it was taken in 2001 without Combs present.
It is not the first time Donald Trump has posted fake images online. Earlier this year, he shared a group of images in which pop star Taylor Swift and her legion of fans appeared to endorse his bid for the presidency, which also turned out to be false.
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