The video was seen millions of times across social media but some viewers were suspicious: It featured a young Black woman who claimed Vice President Kamala Harris left her paralyzed in a hit-and-run accident in San Francisco 13 years ago.
In an emotional retelling from a wheelchair, the alleged victim said she “cannot remain silent anymore” and lamented that her childhood had “ended too soon.”
Immediately after the video was posted on Sept. 2, social media users pointed out reasons to be wary. The purported news channel it came from, San Francisco’s KBSF-TV, didn’t exist. A website for the channel set up just a week earlier contained plagiarized articles from real news outlets. The woman’s X-ray images shown in the video were taken from online medical journals. And the video and the text story on the website spelled the alleged victim’s name differently.
The caution was warranted, according to a new Microsoft threat intelligence report, which confirms the fabricated tale was disinformation from a Russia-linked troll farm.
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Now that everyone knows these exist they have to do a couple obvious fakes to draw away attention away from the insidious ones.