Tried imagery, sexual slurs, racial innuendo — false narratives surrounding Kamala Harris have flowed online as she emerged as the Democratic front-runner in the US presidential race, with researchers warning of a coming flood of gender misinformation.
President Joe Biden dropped out of the race on Sunday and endorsed Harris – the first black, South Asian and female vice president in US history – who has vowed to win her party’s nomination to face Donald Trump in November.
An online explosion of misogynistic and sexist narratives about Harris quickly followed, including lies that had previously been debunked.
Some social media posts repeated that Harris “slept at the top” of American politics, citing her brief relationship in the 1990s with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.
The charge was backed by conservative influencers like Candace Owens, Matt Walsh and Clay Travis.
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Meanwhile, posts on the X platform re-released a defaced image of Harris appearing to pose alongside disgraced stockbroker and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The image — debunked years ago by AFP fact-checkers using a reverse image search — had been manipulated to include Epstein instead of Harris’ husband, Douglas Emhoff.
Online posts also derided US-born Harris as a “Black African”, with some attributing her success solely to her ethnicity.
“It’s important to call out these narratives and lies for what they are: an attempt to undermine the public service of a powerful woman because of her gender, her origin, the color of her skin,” said Nina Jankowicz, co-founder of Disinformation American Sunlight Project. .
“I challenge anyone who opposes Harris’ candidacy to engage in a meaningful discussion about the merits of her policies and record, instead of calling her nasty names.”
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“Lies and Conspiracies”
In 2020, Jankowicz led a study that found more than 336,000 instances of “sexual abuse and misinformation” used to attack 13 female politicians. About 78 percent of that was aimed at Harris.
The misinformation included not only sexual tropes but also false transphobic narratives, such as how Harris could not have risen in politics without secretly being a man.
It also included racist narratives that falsely said Harris was “unfit” to run because both her parents were immigrants, while some insisted she was “exaggerating” her racial identity for political gain.
Roberta Braga, executive director of the Digital Democracy Institute of America, warned Internet users to be on the lookout for “lies and conspiracies” about Harris in the coming days.
“Disinformation will be accompanied by gender-based attacks. And it won’t be new,” Braga said.
Women of color running in the 2020 election were twice as likely as other candidates to be targeted by misinformation, according to a report by the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology.
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They were also four times more likely than white applicants to be the target of violent abuse, the report added.
‘Full Spectrum’
Gender misinformation — when sexism and misogyny intersect with online lies — has relentlessly targeted female politicians around the world, tarnishing their reputations, undermining their credibility and, in many cases, derailing their careers.
AFP’s global fact-checkers have regularly debunked falsehoods targeting politically active women, who often duck online abuse and sex trolling.
As the White House race — already vulnerable to an avalanche of disinformation — heads into its final months, investigators are bracing for a deluge of lies targeting Harris.
Widely available artificial intelligence tools are expected to add fuel to the fire at social networking sites like X — the platform formerly known as Twitter and owned by Elon Musk, who is a staunch supporter of Trump.
Platforms including X have scaled back content moderation, removed many of the guardrails against false information, and reinstated accounts of known fake suppliers.
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“We should expect a full spectrum of misinformation,” said Ronald Deibert, director of the Citizen Lab, a research center affiliated with the University of Toronto.
This will range from “well-organized and professional influence operations, in some cases supported by foreign adversaries, to amateur productions created by miscreants,” Diebert told AFP.
Source: AFP