Kamala Harris video altered to add incoherent ramble

"I present the Vice President of what used to be the greatest country on Earth," says one April 30, 2023 tweet sharing the video.

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Screenshot from Twitter taken May 1, 2023

Similar posts spread across Twitter and platforms such as TikTok and Facebook, with several viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

The video appears to show Harris saying: "Today is today. And yesterday was today, yesterday. Tomorrow will be today, tomorrow. So live today, so the future today will be as the past today, as it is tomorrow."

But the 22-second clip has been manipulated to change the audio.

A watermark added to the text on the podium indicates the video was created by a pro-Donald Trump meme account whose April 28 tweet drew more than 1.2 million views.

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Screenshot of a tweet taken May 1, 2023

The original footage comes from an April 25 address Harris delivered on reproductive rights at Howard University in Washington.

AFP found the unedited version (archived here), which was streamed on Facebook by the non-profit group NARAL Pro-Choice America, using reverse image and keyword searches. Harris's movements starting at the approximately the one-hour, one-minute mark match her gestures in the altered iteration shared online.

According to the footage and official White House transcript, Harris said: "So I think it's very important -- as you have heard from so many incredible leaders -- for us, at every moment in time, and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualize it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past, but the future. And I will say to everyone here that we are living, I do believe, in a moment in time where so many of our hard-won freedoms are under attack, and this is a moment for us to stand and fight."

The vice president went on to discuss the US Supreme Court's September 2022 ruling overturning Roe v. Wade and Republicans' subsequent efforts to restrict access to abortion.

Some critics and articles described Harris's comment on contextualizing the current state of affairs as confusing.

But Harris never said "tomorrow will be today, tomorrow," as the manipulated video suggests. That quote has been falsely attributed to her in social media posts dating back months, AFP found.

A spokesperson for the vice president pointed AFP to the White House transcript and said the audio does not match any speech given by Harris.

AFP has previously debunked other "deepfake" videos, which have become increasingly common with advances in artificial intelligence technology, including here, here and here.