Russian Disinformation Campaign Allegedly Used Fake News Site 'KBSF-San Francisco News' and Deepfake Video to Falsely Accuse Kamala Harris of 2011 Hit-and-Run
September 2, 2024
A Russian disinformation campaign allegedly used a fake news site, "KBSF-San Francisco News," and an AI-generated deepfake video to falsely accuse Kamala Harris of a 2011 hit-and-run accident in San Francisco. The deepfake featured a fabricated African-American victim, whose AI-generated testimony spread widely across social media. Microsoft identified the hoax as part of Russian cyber influence operations targeting the 2024 U.S. election, with the site registered in Iceland.
- Alleged deployer
- storm-1516, kbsf-san-francisco-news, john-mark-dougan, government-of-russia
- Alleged developer
- john-mark-dougan, government-of-russia
- Alleged harmed parties
- kamala-harris, general-public-of-the-united-states, general-public, democracy, epistemic-integrity, journalistic-integrity, media-integrity, journalism, national-security-and-intelligence-stakeholders
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/969
Data source
Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).
When citing the database as a whole, please use:
McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.
Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide
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