THE US PRESIDENTIAL race has been a hotbed of misinformation, with numerous falsehoods about both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump swirling in recent weeks.
This week, more claims have focused on Harris – the Democrats’ candidate – including a fake news story that she was involved in a hit-an-run incident that paralysed a child and misinformation that she has faked being black and has dressed in communist attire.
These claims are all false.
A fake news story widely shared on social media in recent days claims that “Kamala Harris hit a 13-year-old girl with a car and left the crime scene”.
However, the story is not true and the supposed ‘radio station’ that broke it, KBSF San Francisco News, does not exist despite appearing to be legitimate.
The website for the ‘station’ has a stylish logo and video animations, but is a fake news operation, similar to others which have been recorded spreading disinformation during previous political campaigns.
The website appears to have been taken offline after publishing the story on 2 September, and its domain was registered through a company called namecheap.com around two weeks ago.
The story about Harris claimed that the current US vice president drove the wrong way down a San Francisco street and hit a 13-year-old child, permanently destroying her ability to walk. It further alleged that Harris used threats to cover the incident up.
However, the article contained several inconsistencies including variations on the spelling of the victim’s name between “Alisha” and “Alicia”.
Footage of an ‘interview’ with the alleged victim shows clear evidence of digital tampering and supposed pictures included in the story were taken from publicly available sources: a supposed photo of the crash came from a Dutch news story, while images purportedly showing the girl’s injuries were taken from published journals written by researchers in China and the Netherlands.
Shayan Sardarizadeh, a misinformation researcher with the BBC, said that the site that published the story was “most likely part of a pro-Kremlin disinformation operation” run from Moscow by a former US police officer, which regularly created fake US news sites that reported on fabricated “evidence” in their stories.
Harris’s ethnicity has also been the subject of misinformation, including by the Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump.
Some commentators have suggested that she was not legitimately African-American.
Speaking at an event hosted by the National Association of Black Journalists in early August, Trump responded to accusations that his supporters had used unacceptable racial language against Harris by saying: “I didn’t know she was black. Until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black. And now she wants to be known as black.”
The claim has spread to social media, where posts have suggested that Harris has faked her ethnicity for political reasons.
Trump went on to say: “She was Indian all the way and then, all of a sudden, she made a turn and she became a black person.”
However, Harris can legitimately claim African American heritage.
Her father is a black Jamaican and she attended Howard University, a historically black university, where she graduated in 1986.
Although she also partly identifies as Asian American — her mother is Indian — Harris has long identified as an “African American”, as she did during a 2006 C-Span recording of “emerging leaders in the black community”.
Another notable source of misinformation about Harris is X’s owner Elon Musk, who has used the platform to spread falsehoods about her.
“Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one,” he wrote alongside an image of Harris wearing a red military uniform with a hammer and sickle stitched onto her hat. “Can you believe she wears that outfit!?”
However, the image was clearly generated by Artificial Intelligence. The blurry background of a structure akin to a car park, her asymmetrical earrings, and lapel that blends into the breast of her suit are all tell-tale signs of AI-generated images.
Harris also does not have a pronounced chin dimple in real life, while her nostrils are different in the image than in reality.
Musk posted the claim in response to a post on X by Harris that said “Donald Trump vows to be a dictator on Day One”; he also responded to Harris saying “You are lying”.
Harris’ claim about Trump goes back to an interview given by Trump to Fox News host Sean Hannity in December, when he was asked if he would break the law and abuse his power to seek retribution against his political enemies, Trump responded “Except for day one”.
“I love this guy,” Trump continued, gesturing toward Hannity. “He says ‘you’re not going to be a dictator are ya?’ I said ‘No, no, no, other than day one.’”
Previous US presidential elections have seen extremely high levels of misinformation, with much of it originating from the Trump campaign and his supporters.
Researchers documented hundreds of thousands of online claims that Democrats had fraudulently stolen the election and that a civil war was needed to restore democracy, culminating in the 2020 attack on the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 in an attempt to forcefully prevent the presidency of Joe Biden from being formalised by Congress.
The New York Times has also noted that Democrat-leaning Americans, including the Harris campaign, have also weaponised falsehoods against their opponents.
One such example is the claim that JD Vance was intimate with a couch.
It was also noted that in the immediate aftermath of an assassination attempt on Trump in July some left-wing commentators argued it had been “staged” by Trump’s own campaign to garner sympathy.
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