Sham U.S. news site spreads false claims about Kamala Harris

A website claiming to be a local San Francisco news outlet named KBSF-TV published a baseless claim on Monday alleging that Vice President Kamala Harris was involved in a June 2011 hit-and-run incident that left a 13-year-old girl paralyzed. Harris was California‘s attorney general at the time, and has been a longtime Bay Area resident.

Analysis of the article and site indicate the story is false; public records and news reports show no evidence of the hit-and-run incident. The San Francisco Police Department told CBS News that they could not find records of the incident. A CBS News analysis of a video that accompanied the article found it contained several photos from other unrelated news stories. 

Despite this, the story spread widely on social media before the site disappeared. Posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, that featured the article and video amassed more than 7 million views, and the story was also shared on Facebook, TikTok and YouTube. Pro-Russian channels on Telegram, the popular messaging app European officials are investigating for alleged criminal activity on the platform, also shared the story and video. 

Experts say it’s the latest example of a sham news website designed to spread false claims ahead of the 2024 presidential election. 

The claim

The KBSF-TV site, designed with the appearance of a local news outlet, was created as a WordPress blog on Aug. 20, and went offline two days after it published the story. CBS News could not find official records for a KBSF-TV in California, indicating that it is a bogus site. 

The woman featured in the five-minute video embedded within 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 an individual matching the woman’s location, age, physical description and name — including the spelling variation — to contact for comment.

CBS News 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. An image of a car crash shown in the video was from a 2018 incident in Guam. 

Before the site disappeared, the article was picked up by accounts with large followings on social media; prominent X accounts – some with hundreds of thousands of followers – spread the story further on Tuesday. They shared screenshots of the article, as well as the accompanying video.

Sham 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 from the video and did not see evidence of it being AI-generated. 

“We’re so caught up with generative AI these days that we forget you don’t really need technology to lie,” Farid said. 

When asked about what the platforms are doing to combat false claims from websites like KBSF-TV, X sent an automatic reply that the PR team is busy. A Meta spokesperson linked the company’s third-party fact-checking program, and a TikTok spokesperson said the reported video was removed for violation of their Community Guidelines. A Telegram spokesperson said the platform is developing a fact-checking tool. Google did not return a comment.

When contacted by CBS News seeking comment, the Harris campaign did not reply.

The KBSF-TV website has since gone offline. The website, and the baseless claim it published, is the latest example of a sham news website spreading false information ahead of the November presidential election, experts said. 

NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation, has previously identified more than 1,000 “unreliable AI-generated” news websites that publish content based on what is trending on Google.

McKenzie Sadeghi, NewsGuard’s AI and foreign influence editor, told CBS News that sham websites are designed to look like legitimate news sites to dupe readers into believing the information is coming from a reliable and legitimate source. 

Sadeghi said that the KBSF-TV website is similar to a network of more than 160 sham news websites connected to an American former deputy sheriff living in Russia named John Mark Dougan. 

BBC Verify, The New York Times, and others previously reported on Dougan and the network of sham news sites. Researchers at Clemson University and Recorded Future also connected Dougan to the network of sites through his I.P. address and other online records.

When contacted by CBS News about the NewsGuard report on him and if he was involved in creating the KBSF-TV website, Dougan said: “I can’t help what they imply.”

Farid said the KBSF-TV website, as well as the baseless claim it promoted, is a reminder that readers need to use caution when consuming news online. 

“Social media is designed to manipulate you,” said Farid. “I just think we have to find a way to sort of trust that there are places to get reliable information and there are places to not, and we just [have to] distinguish between those two things again.”

In September, the Justice Department charged two Russian nationals and seized more than 30 website domains involved in what the Biden administration claimed is a Russian government-linked influence campaign in an attempt to manipulate the 2024 presidential election.

“Covert attempts to sow division and trick Americans into unwittingly consuming foreign propaganda represents attacks on our democracy,” said FBI Director Christopher Wray in a statement announcing the indictments.