Report 4901

"It happened on the corner of Post and Jones Streets. We were crossing and a car came out from behind a parked van. Post Street is a one-way street, so we weren't expecting anyone to come from that side. Mom reacted quickly and jumped back, grabbed my arm, but it was too late. I got hit in the side and knocked into the road. I fell onto the sidewalk and hit my back. I remember lying on the side of the road looking at the woman who hit me. She was sitting behind the wheel, looking at me. I heard my mom scream, and then the woman started the car and drove off. I tried to turn my head and look at my mom, but the pain just overwhelmed me and I passed out."

This story, rich in details and purposely constructed to arouse emotion, empathy and above all indignation, was published on a fake news site related to San Francisco (it disappeared from the Internet but there are traces of it on the Wayback Machine](https://web.archive.org/web/20240903181856/https://kbsf-tv.com/kamala-harris-hit-a-13-year-old-girl-with-a-car-and-left-the-crime-scene/) of the Internet Archive) and talks about an event that never happened. It talks about Kamala Harris, now a Democratic candidate for the White House and then Attorney General of California, who allegedly ran over a 13-year-old girl and then fled. The possible next president of the United States would therefore be a hit-and-run driver. If this story were true, which it isn't.

Experts say it is 97% fake

The hoax, which was also accompanied online by a video of over 4 minutes in which the alleged victim (who would now be 26 years old and was created with artificial intelligence) relived the terrible moments of the non-existent accident, was published for the first time last September 2 and widely shared on Facebook, Reddit, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube and on Russian platforms such as VK, in English, French, Russian, German and Portuguese. According to NewsGuard, which reported the story, it was cited over 10 thousand times on Twitter alone in the first 24 hours.

The fake woman, who is African-American evidently to further hurt Harris from a political point of view, is said to be called Alicia Brown or Alisha Brown (as usual, fake news are not even consistent with themselves) and if you look carefully and calmly at the video in which she speaks you will notice clear problems: her teeth disappear and reappear at times, the area around her face appears blurry at times and the lip movements seem to stop and then start again. According to TrueMedia, a useful tool for identifying deepfakes, there would be a 97% probability that the woman's voice was totally created or in any case manipulated with AI and a 73% probability that the woman's face was modified or recreated with AI.

Who did it?

There is currently no evidence that Harris was involved in a car accident of this kind in 2011, and even the alleged X-ray of the girl shown in the video appeared in a 2017 scientific paper on pediatric orthopedics. Furthermore, there is no news outlet called KBSF-TV in the United States: the site that spread the hoax went online on August 20 and was removed from the Internet on September 4.

According to NewsGuard, it is difficult to trace the culprit, but many clues point to a certain John Mark Dougan, a serial spreader of fake news who fled to Russia in 2016 to escape a criminal investigation in the United States, and who over the years has created 167 disinformation sites, often using videos generated with artificial intelligence to make unfounded accusations, including against other Dem politicians in the United States.