Kamala Harris deepfakes are going viral on TikTok and Elon Musk’s X
The internet has been full of reactions and memes ever since Joe Biden announced he wasn’t running for reelection on Sunday and proceeded to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris to be the Democratic nominee.
Harris’ supporters on social media have focused on funny moments and offbeat speeches delivered by the Vice President over the past few years. Like “Do you think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”, for example.
Some supporters of the Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump, however, have chosen a different path: Sharing manipulated media on social media showcasing a fake speech that Kamala Harris never delivered.
The video, which has gone viral on TikTok and Twitter, features Kamala Harris speaking in front of a live crowd. However, the clip is a deepfake. The video has been edited and the audio has been replaced with what appears to be an AI-generated clone voice.
Media Matters for America released a report on Monday concerning the deepfake going viral on TikTok, where it received millions of views. Shortly after the report, TikTok removed the posts as well as the fake audio from the platform.
“TikTok has firm policies against harmful AI-generated content and misleadingly edited media, and is aggressively removing this content while partnering with fact-checkers to assess the accuracy of content on TikTok in real time,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a statement provided to Mashable.
Kamala Harris deepfake resurges after candidacy for president
This is not the first time that this specific Kamala Harris deepfake has been spread online. Multiple outlets debunked the deepfake video of Harris when it was first posted last year.
The deepfake clip features a bonafide video of Harris speaking in front of an audience at Howard University in 2023. However, the video has been digitally altered.
“Today is today and yesterday was today yesterday,” Kamala Harris appears to say while slurring her words in the viral video. “Tomorrow will be today tomorrow. So, live today so the future today will be as the past today, as it is tomorrow.”
However, Harris never said that quote.
The full video of the live event does not feature the moment seen in the viral deepfake clip. Experts have pointed out that there is digital noise around her mouth in the video, an attempt to edit the clip to match the fake audio. In addition, the fake audio doesn’t feature any background noise nor audio from the crowd.
Regardless, more than a year after the Harris deepfake was debunked, it went viral on Elon Musk’s X after a right-wing user uploaded the clip to the platform last week. The post still exists on X, where it has received more than 3.4 million views. Based on its policies, X does not remove this type of content. However, X users did manage to add a user-generated Community Note to the post, letting others know that the video is fake.
Unlike X, AI-generated misinformation does break TikTok’s platform rules. TikTok says it proactively removes 98 percent of content violating its policies. However, according to the Media Matters report, one of the viral uploads of the Harris deepfake received more than 4.1 million views before it was removed. TikTok says it is working to detect other uploads of the Harris deepfake in order to remove it.
Deepfake videos have long been a concern for political campaigns. Now, with AI-generated audio and video tools so freely available and accessible by the public, deepfakes will likely be a bigger issue in 2024 than ever before.
