A story from a fake and supposedly SF-based news site claimed that VP Kamala Harris had hit a 13-year-old girl with her car and left her paralyzed. The site has since gone offline, and Microsoft analysts have determined it was run by a Russian influence campaign.
On Monday, September 2, a story bubbled up online from a purportedly San Francisco-based news site called KBSF-TV claiming their discovery that in 2011, Kamala Harris had run over a 13-year-old girl with her car and drove away from the scene, leaving the girl paralyzed. By the end of the week, CBS News had fully debunked the story, noting that SFPD had no record of any such incident, that there is no KBSF-TV in California, and that the images were largely lifted from other news stories.
The link to the story still exists, but has gone dead. The URL indicates the headline read “Kamala Harris Hit a 13-Year-Old Girl With a Car and Left the Crime Scene.”
The intentionally fake news story has been removed from TikTok and all the Meta platforms, but unsurprisingly, is still all over Elon Musk’s Twitter. (Feel free to search for it, it also has a video, and draw your own conclusion why the video has Russian subtitles.) The woman in the video is not AI-generated, but analysts have concluded that she’s an actor.
That’s one of many conclusions, as CBS News now reports that Microsoft analysts have concluded the site is a Russian troll farm operation run by a group known as Storm-1516. The KBSF-TV website was created on August 20, about ten days before they published the Harris story.
According to the full Microsoft report, the influence campaign “used an on-screen actor to fabricate false claims that Harris paralyzed a girl in a 2011 hit-and-run accident.” Their analysts add that the campaign “laundered this video through a website masquerading as a local San Francisco media outlet—which outlet was only created days beforehand.”
The Russian influence campaigns have been busy this election cycle, as less than two weeks ago, a US indictment charged that Russian propaganda outfit RT had recruited conservative online influencers Dave Rubin, Tim Pool, and Benny Johnson, and paid them to push Kremlin narratives. On Monday, Meta banned RT from its Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp platforms.
Related: Time Magazine Posts Fake-News Tweet About San Francisco Being On Fire [SFist]
GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA - SEPTEMBER 12: Democratic presidential nominee, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign rally at the Greensboro Coliseum September 12, 2024 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Harris held two rallies today in the state of North Carolina on the heels of her debate two nights ago with Republican presidential nominee, former U.S. President Donald Trump. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
