CBS News
A website posing as a local San Francisco news outlet, KBSF-TV, published a baseless claim Monday that Vice President Kamala Harris was involved in a June 2011 hit-and-run that left a 13-year-old girl paralyzed. Harris was California’s attorney general at the time and is a longtime resident of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Analysis of the article and website indicates that the story is false. Public records and news reports show no evidence of the incident. The San Francisco Police Department told CBS News it could not find any evidence of the incident. A CBS News analysis of a video accompanying the article found that it contained several photos from other, unrelated news articles.
Even so, the story spread widely on social media before the site was taken down. Posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, featuring the article and video have racked up more than 7 million views, and the story has also been shared on Facebook, TikTok and YouTube. Pro-Russian channels on Telegram, the popular messaging app, are investigation for alleged criminal activity on the platform, also shared the story and video.
Experts say this is the latest example of a fake news site designed to spread false claims ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
The claim
The KBSF-TV site, designed to look like a local news outlet, was created as a WordPress blog on August 20 and was taken offline two days after the article was published. CBS News was unable to find any official records for a KBSF-TV station in California, indicating that it is a fake site.
The woman who appears in the five-minute video embedded in the article speaks about the alleged incident. Her name is listed as “Alicia Brown” in the video, but her name appears as “Alisha Brown” in the article. An online search did not find anyone matching the woman’s location, age, physical description, and name (including spelling variation) to contact for comment.
CBS News has identified several elements in the video that indicate the story is fabricated. A chest X-ray shown in the video appears to have been taken from a medical journal, and the date printed on the image shows it was taken in 2004, several years before the alleged incident. The image of a car crash shown in the video is from a 2018 incident in Guam.
Before the site went down, the article was picked up by popular social media accounts; prominent X accounts — some with hundreds of thousands of followers — picked up the story Tuesday. They shared screenshots of the article, as well as the accompanying video.
Fake news sites
Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor who specializes in digital forensics and manipulated media, told CBS News he believes the video is staged. Farid said he tested both the voice and face in the video and saw no evidence it was generated by AI.
“We are so consumed with generative AI these days that we forget that we don’t really need the technology to lie,” Farid said.
Asked what steps the platforms are taking to combat false claims from websites like KBSF-TV, X sent an automated response saying the public relations team was busy. A Meta spokesperson pointed to the company’s third-party fact-checking program, and a TikTok spokesperson said the flagged video was removed for violating its community guidelines. A Telegram spokesperson said the platform is developing a fact-checking tool. Google did not respond for comment.
Contacted by CBS News for comment, the Harris campaign did not respond.
The KBSF-TV website is now offline, the site and the baseless allegations it published being the latest example of a fake news site spreading false information ahead of the November presidential election, experts said.
NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation, has already identified more than 1,000 “untrustworthy AI-generated” news sites that publish content based on trends on Google.
McKenzie Sadeghi, NewsGuard’s editor for artificial intelligence and foreign influence, told CBS News that fake websites are designed to look like legitimate news sites in order to trick readers into thinking the information is coming from a trusted, legitimate source.
Sadeghi said the KBSF-TV website is similar to a network of more than 160 fake news sites connected to a former U.S. deputy sheriff living in Russia named John Mark Dougan.
BBC Verify, the New York Times and other media outlets have previously reported on Dougan and the fake news network. Researchers at Clemson University and Recorded Future have also linked Dougan to the network of sites through his IP address and other online records.
Contacted by CBS News about the NewsGuard report about him and his possible involvement in the creation of the KBSF-TV website, Dougan said, “I can’t help but say what they’re implying.”
Farid said the KBSF-TV website, and the baseless claim it promotes, reminds readers to exercise caution when consuming information online.
“Social media is designed to manipulate you,” Farid said. “I just think we need to find a way to trust that there are places to get reliable information and places not to get it, and we just need to [have to] “To distinguish between these two things again.”
In September, the Ministry of Justice charge two Russian nationals and seized More than 30 website domains involved in what the Biden administration has claimed is a Russian government-linked influence campaign aimed at manipulating the 2024 presidential election.
“Covert efforts to sow division and deceive Americans into unknowingly consuming foreign propaganda are attacks on our democracy,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a statement announcing the charges.
Erielle Delzer
