Billionaire Elon Musk shared a deepfake video of Vice President Kamala Harris manipulated to make it sound like she spoke about President Joe Biden’s “senility” and that she does not “know the first thing about running the country.”
“I, Kamala Harris, am your Democrat candidate for president because Joe Biden finally exposed his senility,” the altered audio says in the video Musk posted to his account on X, formerly Twitter. The audio, which sounds like Harris but is digitally manipulated, goes on to say Harris was chosen “because I am the ultimate diversity hire” as “both a woman and a person of color.”
Musk did not disclose in his post that the video or audio had been manipulated, only writing, “This is amazing 
” in the caption. According to The New York Times, the video was originally posted by X user @MrReaganUSA, who indicated in the post that the video was a “parody.” The altered version of the video parodies a Harris ad titled “We Choose Freedom.”
X’s policies explicitly prohibit “synthetic, manipulated or out-of-context media that may deceive or confuse people and lead to harm.” As of Sunday morning, X had not appended a Community Note to the post. Community Notes are used by the platform to correct misinformation or misleading posts. At the time of this publication, the video had garnered nearly 118 million views.
In a statement obtained by The Times, the Harris campaign said, “The American people want the real freedom, opportunity and security Vice President Harris is offering; not the fake, manipulated lies of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.”
Reacting to the video, Alex Howard, a digital governance expert and the director of the Digital Democracy Project at the Demand Progress Education Fund, posted in response to Musk, “This is a violation of @X’s policies on synthetic media & misleading identities. Are you going to retroactively change them to allow violations in an election year?”
Harris, who has emerged as the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination following President Joe Biden’s decision to exit the race, has earned endorsements from Biden, Barack and Michelle Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi, among other Democratic power players.
Deepfakes and AI-altered media have emerged as a disinformation threat in recent years. A Democratic consultant faces criminal charges of voter suppression and a $6 million Federal Communications Commission fine for deepfake audio calls that used an altered version of Biden’s voice to discourage voters from participating in the New Hampshire presidential primary. Last year, the Ron DeSantis campaign shared apparent AI-generated images of Donald Trump hugging infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci. Deepfakes have also been used in attempts to influence elections abroad.
A Brookings report from January noted that “generative AI content has the potential to turbocharge campaigns designed to undermine democratic discourse by making content higher quality, more substantively distinct, and easier to mass produce than past information campaigns launched both domestically and as part of foreign influence operations.”
Many state legislatures have taken on the issue and banned deepfakes in electoral politics. In April the House Oversight Committee held a hearing on the threat deepfakes pose in elections. Just last week, the Senate passed a bill championed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — the DEFIANCE Act — that would ban non-consensual, sexually-explicit, AI-generated imagery. Now it heads to the House. Ocasio-Cortez has been the victim of such deepfakes and first announced the bill in an interview with Rolling Stone.
“There’s a shock to seeing images of yourself that someone could think are real,” Ocasio-Cortez told Rolling Stone. “And once you’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. It parallels the same exact intention of physical rape and sexual assault.”
“It’s time to give victims their day in court and the tools they need to fight back,” Sen. Dick Durbin said when the legislation passed the Senate.
