An internet site with a patriotic title makes a wild accusation about Vice President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff receiving a payoff from rapper Sean “Diddy” Combs.
Not solely is it fictitious, however U.S. officers stated it’s linked to Russian makes an attempt to affect the U.S. election.
“Harris and Emhoff obtained $500 000 for tipping Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs off on upcoming police raids in March 2024,” acknowledged an Oct. 30 headline on Patriot Voice.
The headline was repeated on social media, together with on X and Instagram.
The Instagram submit was flagged as a part of Meta’s efforts to fight false information and misinformation on its Information Feed. (Learn extra about our partnership with Meta, which owns Fb, Instagram and Threads.)
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A joint Nov. 1 assertion by the FBI, Workplace of the Director of Nationwide Intelligence, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Safety Company stated “Russian affect actors” had “manufactured a video falsely accusing a person related to the Democratic presidential ticket of taking a bribe from a U.S. entertainer.”
The companies additionally stated Russian affect drove a faux video that confirmed Haitians claiming to vote for Harris in a number of Georgia counties. Patriot Voice printed the faux Haitian narrative as a legitimate-looking story.
The companies’ assertion stated, “This Russian exercise is a part of Moscow’s broader effort to lift unfounded questions concerning the integrity of the U.S. election and stoke divisions amongst People.” Officers anticipate related Russian exercise via Election Day and past.
Combs was charged in September in Manhattan federal courtroom with intercourse trafficking and associated offenses. The indictment stated that regulation enforcement “in or about March 2024” searched his houses in Miami and Los Angeles.
The Patriot Voice story stated the nameless writer “managed to acquire a confession that Harris and Emhoff have contacted Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs previous to his arrest and obtained from him a money cost for the tip” about an impending raid. It stated the knowledge got here from a lawyer who labored with Emhoff at his former regulation agency, however doesn’t disclose the lawyer’s title. Emhoff is a former leisure lawyer.
The article incorporates a two-minute video exhibiting what seems to be a person talking to a digicam from a automobile, together with his face blurred out. Earlier than the person speaks, textual content on the video says “a New York lawyer acquainted with Emhoff shared the main points of the deal.” One other particular person asks the person questions.
The video is probably going a “low-cost faux,” stated Manjeet Rege, director of the Heart for Utilized Synthetic Intelligence on the College of St. Thomas. Meaning it was edited with know-how to be misleading, however it isn’t a “deepfake” that was wholly created with generative synthetic intelligence.
The voice and hand gestures don’t align, which is an indication that the voice was modified and added over an present video of an individual in a automobile, Rege stated. The audio of the particular person asking the questions was in all probability created with an actual particular person however transformed via software program so it’s tough to detect the speaker.
We fact-checked the same instance of a “low-cost faux” video in social media posts purporting to indicate Harris was concerned in a 2011 hit and run.
There are different indicators that this declare about Combs, Harris and Emhoff is faux. PatriotVoiceNews.com lacks the usual options of a legit information web site. For instance, it has no “about us” web page that explains the publication’s background data and affords a approach to contact employees members. We clicked on a number of articles and located no bylines; they have been all written by “Patriot Voice.” The web site was created Aug. 5, 2024, about three months earlier than Election Day, in line with its area registration data on Whois.com.
Snopes additionally fact-checked this declare, discovering that in three months the web site printed greater than 1,000 articles, all by the identical writer.
NewsGuard, an organization that tracks on-line misinformation, wrote in a 2024 U.S. Election Misinformation Monitoring Heart transient that the “website’s traits, together with its structure, content material, and use of AI, strongly resemble a pro-Kremlin community of pretend native information websites run by John Mark Dougan, a former Florida deputy sheriff who fled to Russia in 2016.”
This declare is bogus. We charge it Pants on Fireplace!
RELATED: Video reveals Haitians who declare they’re voting for Harris in a number of Georgia counties. That’s faux
