US intelligence says Russians created fake Bay Area news site to fabricate Harris scandal

Michael Wilner and Gillian Brassil | (TNS) McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Russian actors created a fake San Francisco news station that published a staged video this month in an attempt to generate a scandal about Vice President Kamala Harris — the latest example of Moscow’s attempt to denigrate the Democratic presidential nominee in her campaign against former President Donald Trump, U.S. intelligence officials said on Monday.

A website posing as a nonexistent San Francisco news outlet, called KBSF-TV, published a story on Sept. 2 claiming Harris was involved in a hit-and-run in the city while serving as California’s attorney general in 2011. The story included a video in which a woman alleged that Harris was involved in the incident, leaving her paralyzed.

The story was entirely fictitious, as was the website, registered in Iceland and created just a few weeks prior to the story’s publication. But the fabrication nonetheless spread quickly across right-wing social media.

Officials with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI told reporters Monday that the U.S. intelligence community “assesses Russian influence actors were responsible for staging a widely reported video in which a woman claims she was a victim of a hit-and-run car accident by the vice president.”

“This content is also consistent with Russia’s broader efforts to boost the former president’s candidacy and denigrate the vice president and the Democratic Party, including through conspiratorial narratives,” one ODNI official said.

The domain, kbsf-tv.com, was registered through Namecheap on Aug. 20, and the registrant used an address in Reykjavik that had been used in other online scams.

Articles on the site were posted without attribution and appear to take text from real news outlets’ stories.

On X, formerly known as Twitter, community notes indicating the allegations were fabricated were appended to posts that circulated the story.

It is not the first, nor it will be the last, use of technology aiming to spread narratives about candidates. Microsoft, in its own, independent assessment published last week, also found that Russian actors had switched to a playbook of denigrating the vice president.

“Russia has generated the most AI content related to the election, and has done so across all four mediums — text, images, audio and video,” the ODNI official said.

While intelligence officials do not make an assessment of the impact of foreign efforts to influence or interfere with U.S. elections, the ODNI official said that the intelligence community thus far believes that AI-generated content is serving to “improve and accelerate foreign influence operations.” It has not yet become a “revolutionary influence tool,” the official said.

Actors such as the Russians are deploying AI-generated content by “laundering material through prominent figures, using inauthentic social media accounts, creating websites pretending to be legitimate news outlets, or releasing supposed leaks of AI-generated content that appear sensitive or controversial,” the official added.

The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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