A fake news report posted online in early September by a fake news site claims that presidential candidate Kamala Harris was responsible for a hit-and-run back in 2011 that left a young girl in a wheelchair. Pro-Russian and pro-Trump social media accounts have been widely circulating a video featuring the alleged victim of the hit-and-run and accusing Harris. However, there are indications that the interview is fake and possibly AI-created.
If you only have a minute
- A news report published by a site called KBSF-TV features an interview with a woman named Alicia Brown, said to be the victim of a hit-and-run perpetrated by Vice President Kamala Harris back in 2011. Brown says that she now uses a wheelchair because of the accident.
- However, there are a number of indications that both the interview and the site are fake. For one, the site has only been online a few weeks.
- Pro-Russian and pro-Trump disinformation networks, already identified by our team in the past, were responsible for spreading this fake report widely online. It garnered more than two million views on X alone.
The fact check, in detail
"Will #HitAndRunKamala lose the US presidential election over this shocking revelation!” reads a post published on X on September 3 by a pro-Russian Australian influencer who goes by “Aussie Cossack”. His post features a video in which a young woman accuses presidential candidate Kamala Harris of a hit-and-run that occurred back in 2011.
The video, which was made to look like a news report from a fake San Francisco news outlet called “KBSF-TV,” was published on September 2 on the site kbsf-tv.com (which has since been taken down). The report, which lasts five minutes and 30 seconds, tells the "tragic story of 26-year-old Alicia Brown", paralysed after a hit-and-run she claims was carried out by Harris back in 2011 when she was serving as attorney general of California.
“We were crossing the road, and, out of nowhere, a car came out at us from behind a parked van [...] I was hit in the side and thrown onto the road. I fell on the curb and hit my back,” the woman, in a wheelchair, says to the camera.
She goes on to claim that Harris was the driver of the vehicle. She also says that two men representing the then attorney general told her mother that there would be consequences if the story got out.
The report also features several X-rays of broken bones, apparently taken of Brown’s body after the hit-and-run.
Could this be enough to quash the presidential hopeful’s chances? Some pro-Trump accounts think so.
"Make this go viral MAGA folks!” Aussie Cossack says in the post, referring to the acronym of Trump’s slogan "Make America Great Again".
A fake news site…
However, there are a number of clues that show that this video report and the testimony it features are fake. Indeed, it uses similar disinformation strategies to other fake news content that our team has identified in recent months.
The site that published the video and testimony, KBSF-TV.com, is fake. The page claims to share news from the city of San Francisco and is made to look like other news sites. However, it has no online presence except for the site. It doesn’t have any social media accounts. Indeed, we found no online presence before this article was shared.
The KBSF-TV website, which you can still see thanks to the online archive tool Webarchive, doesn’t have any original content. All of its articles are copied and pasted from other American media outlets, like CBS News and ABC.
Moreover, the site, which has since been taken down, was only created recently. Using the online tool Whois, which gives information about domain names, we discovered that it was only created on August 20.
… a testimony with holes in it
The supposed victim of the hit-and-run, Alicia Brown, has no online presence either. Moreover, KBSF-TV spells her name in two different ways. In the article accompanying the video, she is referred to as Alisha.
Moreover, the X-rays featured in the report do not belong to the supposed victim. Our team ran these images through a reverse image search (check out our handy guide here) and discovered that this images come from an image bank hosted by Research Gate, a platform featuring scientific articles (here and here).
Some media outlets and journalists have said that the voice of the victim was AI-generated. People have also pointed to strange moments in the video where the victim’s left hand seems to disappear. Later, one of the wheels on her wheelchair also seems to disappear.
Our team, however, has so far been unable to independently verify these claims.
How pro-Russian and pro-Trump accounts spread this report
Fake news sites and troubling filmed testimonies have been used in other disinformation campaigns that we’ve identified in recent months.
In early July, a video circulated widely online showing a to-camera interview with a man said to be a salesperson at a luxury car dealership. He claimed that Olena Zelenska, the wife of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, had just bought a luxury Bugatti vehicle.
A fake news site called veritecachee.fr also shared doctored receipts supposedly belonging to the First Lady of Ukraine. These fake news items were picked up and shared by Aussie Cossack, who was also one of the first to share these recent fake news stories about Kamala Harris.
These pro-Russian influence operations, nicknamed Copycop or False Façade by different observers, function by sharing fake news stories on sites made to look like real news sites.
While it is difficult to determine who is behind KBSF-TV.com, we analysed the source code of the webpage, which you can see by hitting CTRL+U on a Google Chrome navigator. It turned out the source code contains a clue suggesting Russian implication. KBSF-TV.com has a technical link to top-fwz1.mail.ru. That’s a service located in Russia that measures a site’s audience, which makes it likely that the person behind the site is based in Russia.
Though pro-Russian influencers spread this fake news story about Harris, it really went viral when it was picked up by pro-Trump social media users like X account "I Meme Therefore I Am". There, the video of the fake news report garnered 1.7 million views. A screengrab of the KBSF-TV article shared by @jenreneeX garnered 5.2 million views.
When another social media user questioned the veracity of these claims, Twitter account I Meme Therefore I Am responded with a post : "If this is true, they might claim that the story was fabricated by Russia to help Trump in the elections.”
