Photo of Kamala Harris with Sean 'Diddy' Combs is manipulated
- Published on October 15, 2024 at 18:26
- 3 min read
- By Bill MCCARTHY, AFP USA
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"Kamala's team has spent more than $5 million having images of her with Sean 'P. Diddy' Combs bleached from the internet," says text over a version of the image shared October 14, 2024 on X, amid a flood of misinformation about the 2024 US presidential election.
"It would be such a shame if this made the rounds."
The alleged picture of the US vice president and Democratic presidential nominee spread across X, including in Spanish, as 54-year-old Combs faces a batch of new accusations, including one alleging that he molested a minor.
The music mogul was already facing a laundry list of similar civil suits before federal authorities arrested him in September 2024 on three criminal counts, alleging he sexually abused women and coerced them into drug-fueled sex parties using threats and violence. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges. But having twice been denied bail, he is slated to remain incarcerated until his trial set for May 2025.
Soon after Combs's indictment, social media users seeking to link Harris to his charges shared another doctored image supposedly showing the two together. Former president Donald Trump, Harris's Republican opponent in November's election, amplified the fake on his Truth Social platform.
The latest picture purporting to show Harris and Combs side by side is also altered.
A reverse image search uncovered the original photo of the Grammy winner with Hylton. Photographer Kevin Mazur snapped the shot for Getty Images in 2019 (archived here).
"Sean Combs and Misa Hylton attend Sean Combs 50th Birthday Bash presented by Ciroc Vodka on December 14, 2019 in Los Angeles, California," the caption says.
The manipulated version circulating online is flipped horizontally and superimposes Harris's head onto Hylton's body.
The fake appears to have originated with America's Last Line of Defense, a network of parody websites that publish false stories and hoaxes often mistaken for real news. A Facebook page associated with the network, which says in its bio that "nothing on this page is real," shared the image in a September 30 post claiming Harris's campaign spent millions of dollars trying to scrub such photos from the internet.
America's Last Line of Defense is run by Christopher Blair, who told AFP he thinks people share his content because it fits "their confirmation-biased narrative of the world."
"Whether or not a thing is true no longer matters to about 35 million Americans. If it's what they want to hear, they'll pass it along."
AFP has fact-checked other misinformation about the US election here.
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