Deepfake claiming Kamala Harris was a sex worker circulating less than a day after her first rally

The Internet is already creating deepfakes of US Vice President Kamala Harris, less than 24 hours after her first campaign trail speech for the Democrats’ presidential nomination. 

One tweet, circulated by far-right user Matthew Wallace on X, shows a black and white photo of a young woman from a side profile who the user claims to be Kamala Harris in the 1980s as a sex worker in New York City. 

“Bombshell footage… of Kamala Harris as a prostitute!” the thumbnail reads. 

It leads to a video posted on Rumble, an American video-hosting website that shows alleged sexual relations between Harris and customers. 

The tweet was seen more than 627,000 times as of July 22. 

UK-based fact checking agency, Logically Facts, tracked the photo to Matt Weber, a renowned street photographer in 1988. He told the agency that he considers it a “pathetic reach”. 

At the time, Harris was attending the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco, where she graduated in 1989, according to a press release from the college. 

Logically Facts believes it “is highly improbable” that the potential Democratic nominee “was simultaneously involved in sex work in New York”.

Competence to be president

A graduation photo from that era also shows a different hairstyle from the woman in the photograph. 

“Recently, numerous claims about Harris’s sexual history have emerged, seemingly aimed at undermining her competence as the US presidential elections draw near,” Logically Facts writes in its fact check. 

Other false claims allege she partied with rapper P. Diddy in the early 2000s, that she is ineligible to be US president, and that she called for lowering the age of consent to 12. 

Photoshopped images of Harris alongside Jeffrey Epstein also circulated on X. The real image, according to fact-checkers at BBC Verify, is one taken of Harris with her husband, Doug Emhoff, in 2015. 

This is not the first time deepfake content has been used against the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. 

TikTok has already removed other Harris deepfake content, including one audio track where a digitally-altered Harris is heard slurring her words. 

TikTok told Mashable in a statement that they have “firm policies against harmful AI-generated content,” and that they are “aggressively removing this content”. 

Euronews Next has reached out to TikTok and X for comment.