No evidence Kamala Harris injured teenager in hit-and-run collision
- Published on September 11, 2024 at 20:05
- Updated on September 18, 2024 at 20:43
- 8 min read
- By Daniel GALGANO, AFP USA
Copyright © AFP 2017-2024. Any commercial use of this content requires a subscription. Click here to find out more.
"BREAKING: A 26-year-old woman from San Francisco, Alicia Brown, alleges that Kamala Harris was involved in a 2011 hit-and-run accident that left her unable to walk," says a September 3, 2024 X post with thousands of interactions.
The video in the post features an interview with a woman, identified both as Alicia Brown and Alisha Brown, who claims Harris hit her in July 2011 when she was 13.
Brown alleges she and her mother were intimidated against speaking publicly about the ordeal, and that she is only comfortable discussing it now because her mother recently died.
"Of course, back then I didn't know that it's Kamala Harris, California attorney general -- at the moment, I saw only a frightened stranger woman," she says in the roughly three-minute interview.
The same claim has circulated elsewhere on X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Rumble and Gettr.
Brown says the hit-and-run took place July 7, 2011 at the intersection of Post Street and Jones Street in downtown San Francisco.
However, San Francisco Police Department spokeswoman Allison Maxie said in a September 6, 2024 email that the claim has "no merit" and there is no record of a collision with that description.
Other media outlets, including PolitiFact, NewsGuard, and CBS News, have also debunked the claims.
AFP contacted the Harris campaign and the California attorney general's office for comment, but no responses were forthcoming.
'Not enough evidence' of AI
AFP consulted multiple experts to determine whether the video circulating online is authentic. Some reports indicate the clip was created using artificial intelligence, while other analysts say the video is real even if Brown's claims are inaccurate.
Hany Farid, a leading digital forensics expert at the University of California-Berkeley (archived here), told AFP the interview does not appear to be computer-generated. He said generative AI can have difficulty producing audio longer than a minute or two.
"I think (the) only reason we're having this conversation is because everybody's talking about AI all the time, and every time we see something fake, people want to tag it with AI," Farid said September 11.
"But it's important to understand that there's a lot of ways to lie, and the simplest way, by far, is to stick somebody in a wheelchair and tell them what to say."
Siwei Lyu, director of the Media Forensic Lab at the University at Buffalo (archived here), also said there is "not enough evidence" to conclude the clip was created using AI.
He told AFP he analyzed the footage using seven different AI detection modules. While one indicated it was machine-generated, six others were unsure or did not have enough evidence of manipulation.
No trace of Brown
AFP searched the White Pages for evidence of a San Francisco resident named Alicia or Alisha Brown but found no one around her age.
The archives of local newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Examiner and the Mercury News, also did not surface articles or obituaries mentioning Brown.
X-ray images featured in the video as evidence of her injuries do not check out, either.
A reverse image search reveals the scans come from two unrelated sources. One was taken at a hospital in Jiangsu province, China in 2010 and another stems from a 2017 paper published in the Journal of Children's Orthopaedics (archived here and here).
Another image passed off as the crash was taken by Pacific Daily News photographer Rick Cruz after a 2018 collision in the US territory of Guam (archived here).
Fake news site
The interview with Brown first appeared on a website titled "KBSF -- San Francisco News." The site was not live as of September 11, but an archived version is available via the Internet Archive.
The BBC investigated the domain and found it resembled a network of imposter news websites that AFP has previously fact-checked.
WHOIS, a tool showing who owns a domain and when it was set up, indicates Kbsf-tv.com was first registered August 20, 2024 -- about two weeks before the article about Harris was published (archived here).
The website published dozens of other news pieces, but most headlines and images appear on other outlets' websites. Some articles also predated the domain's registration by more than a month.
While the website resembles a local television station, it does not appear in the US Federal Communications Commission's database of approved broadcasters.
KBSF-LP is a radio station in the US state of Oregon, but the nonprofit that owns the outlet told AFP in a September 6 email that it has no affiliation with the site and does not operate in California.
The KBSF -- San Francisco website says it is run by a company called KBSF Bay Area. However, the California secretary of state has no record of a company by that name.
A report issued by Microsoft's Threat Analysis Center (MTAC) on September 17, 2024 (archived here) concluded the fabricated story originated with a Russian disinformation organization called Storm-1516 and that the group "laundered" the video through the fake KBSF website.
"Russian influence of US elections has remained a constant over the last decade, but in the past few months the MTAC has observed a shift in the tactics for reaching American audiences amidst a dynamic social media environment and a shifting electoral calculus," the report said.
AFP has debunked other false and misleading claims about the 2024 election here.
This article was updated to include information from a September 17, 2024 report from Microsoft's Threat Analysis Center.September 18, 2024 This article was updated to include information from a September 17, 2024 report from Microsoft's Threat Analysis Center.
Is there content that you would like AFP to fact-check? Get in touch.
Contact us
