It has been said: ineligible “, ” unfit to govern the United States “. Kamala Harris has been targeted by a vast disinformation operation on social networks in recent hours. Expected to be the candidate of the Democratic camp after Joe Biden’s withdrawal, the vice-president has become the number one target of fake news coming from the Republican camp. Hijacked videos, manipulated images, everything is done to discredit the former prosecutor, at a rally in the state of Wisconsin this Tuesday, July 23.
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The most shared fake news online claims that Kamala Harris is ” ineligible ” According to pro-Trump accounts, the vice president ” would not be a U.S. citizen by birth “, because his mother is Indian and his father is Jamaican. So what does the law actually say? Article II of the Constitution states that the President must be ” a citizen born in the United States, at least thirty-five years of age, and a resident of the United States for at least fourteen years ” Or Kamala Harris was indeed born on American soil, in Oakland in 1964. The law also specifies that any person born on American soil, regardless of the nationality of their parents, is considered a citizen by birth. The former San Francisco prosecutor therefore checks all the constitutional boxes and can legally run for president for the Democratic camp. This hoax had already been spread by Donald Trump in August 2020.
Along the same lines, some accuse Kamala Harris of pretending to be a black American woman when ” his parents would be white ” Their claim is based on a photo supposedly showing the vice president’s father and mother. In reality, the two people visible in this photo are not his parents.
Kamala Harris close to Jeffrey Epstein?
Another false accusation claims that Kamala Harris was close to billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who was notably convicted of sex trafficking. As proof, accounts are circulating a photo in which we believe they are posing, all smiles, side by side.
In fact, through reverse image search, we know that this is a photomontage. In the original image, taken in 2015, Kamala Harris posed not with Jeffrey Epstein, but with her husband, Douglas Emhoff.
A Manipulated Speech
Beyond the retouched images, we also see the circulation of videos modified via artificial intelligence, also called deepfakes. One of them claims to show Kamala Harris giving a totally incoherent speech. We think we hear her say: ” today is today and yesterday was today yesterday. Tomorrow will be today tomorrow. So live today so that today’s future is like today’s past, as it is tomorrow ” Except that upon verification, Kamala Harris never made these comments. This is a deepfake made by a Donald Trump support account in April 2023.
Warning, this video is fake news.
Most of the fake news targeting Kamala Harris that has been circulating in recent hours is old and has already been the subject of fact-checked articles. This does not prevent them from accumulating millions of views and continuing to deceive Internet users.