A video going viral on social media purports to reveal that Vice President Kamala Harris paralyzed a child in 2011 after being involved in a hit-and-run in San Francisco.
The footage, which is being shared among prominent conservative influencers, claims to originate from a news outlet called KBSF-TV.
The video first appeared to start circulating thanks to a member of the Dilley Meme Team, former President Donald Trump’s army of online shitposters.
One of the first posts online came from a member of the Meme Team, who took the video and slapped his watermark on it, leading to speculation they were potentially behind the initial effort.
“Is this true @KamalaHarris?” wrote @miguelifornia, who describes himself as the group’s chaplain and is listed on their site as a participant.
The newscast interviews a woman said to be named Alicia Brown, who claims she and her mother were not only run over but threatened by associates of Harris to keep the incident a secret for over a decade.
The video quickly blew up among conservatives on X, who questioned whether Harris was intoxicated at the time of the alleged crime.
Harris, in recent weeks, has faced an unfounded right-wing smear campaign centered around alcohol, accusations that have never been corroborated.
Others called for the politician to be investigated and jailed given that Brown had been paralyzed.
But not everyone fell for the story. As many began to dig, it quickly became apparent that the allegation was part of an elaborate attempt to stir up chaos amid the election season.
Many swiftly noticed that the media outlet alleged to have produced the interview, KBSF-TV, wasn’t real. Analysis of the outlet reveals that its domain was registered just two weeks ago on Aug. 20, according to GoDaddy. The site has since been taken down.
An image used in the video of a car with a cracked windshield can be traced using a reverse image search to a legitimate news story about a 2018 car crash in Guam.
A section of the video that alleges to show X-rays of Brown’s injuries wasn’t real either. A reverse image search revealed that the pictures had been taken from medical journals online.
So where did the video actually come from? While it isn’t confirmed, experts such as BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh say the effort has the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.
Specifically, Sardarizadeh says, the fake website and the video are consistent with other campaigns run by John Mark Dougan, a former Florida police officer who now lives in Moscow.
Dougan, according to reporting from the BBC, is a key figure in “a network of Russia-based websites masquerading as local American newspapers” that are “pumping out fake stories as part of an AI-powered operation” using deepfakes aimed at targeting the 2024 presidential election.
Previous stories linked to the operation by the BBC include the false claim that Olena Zelenska, the first lady of Ukraine, used American military aid money to purchase a multi-million dollar Bugatti sports car. The story went viral among conservatives earlier this year.
Thankfully, the virality of the hit-and-run allegation against Harris has already waned, thanks to many posts getting Community Notes.
But while this false story about Harris may not have legs, many more attempts like this will pop up in the next few months, supercharged by Trump influencers looking to gin up any controversy they can.
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