Politics

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A video known as a “deepfake” that was posted on X on Saturday appears to show Harris repeating herself over and over again, using a crude audio rendering made to seem like Harris is struggling to finish a complete sentence. The altered video uses footage from an appearance by Harris and President Joe Biden following Friday’s historic prisoner swap that freed Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and others. The video is obviously manipulated and easily debunked by viewing the unaltered footage (you can watch that here at about the 1:30 mark), which shows Harris speaking smoothly, without repeating the same words and phrases as portrayed in the doctored video.

The video, whose origin is unclear, was posted by Trump himself on Truth Social on Saturday, accompanied by a rant in which he calls Harris “DUMB!” and “extremely Low IQ.” The video was soon re-shared on X by an account that posts content verbatim from Trump’s feed on Truth Social. That account on X has more than 800,000 followers, and, as of late Sunday, the post containing the Harris deepfake had drawn more than 620,000 views.

The video appears to be in violation of X’s terms of service, which prohibit the sharing of “synthetic, manipulated, or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.” (It also appears to violate Truth Social’s terms of service, which requires that posts “are not false, inaccurate, or misleading”—a tall order, perhaps, given that platform’s owner.)

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Other forms of disinformation targeting Harris, including racist and misogynistic content, have proliferated across social media. But the reach personally enjoyed by Musk and Trump through the platforms they own is bigger than that of most.

As Harris has been steadily gaining on Trump in recent polls, the spread of deepfakes targeting her on X seems no coincidence alongside Musk’s evolving views about Trump. He once declared the ex-president too old to hold office again. Now Trump has Musk’s “full endorsement.”

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