Foreign interference, destabilization of Donald Trump fanatics? While the former US president and Democrat Kamala Harris are still neck and neck in the voting intention polls four days before the presidential election in the United States, a multitude of fake news is broadcast and shared every day on social networks.
This false information generally targets current Vice-President Kamala Harris, or the electoral system, deemed susceptible to fraud of all kinds by supporters of Donald Trump. This Friday, authorities in Georgia, a key southern state, warned that a video showing a Haitian immigrant explaining that he had voted several times was false and part of a disinformation campaign originating from abroad.
Video“Migrants eat cats and dogs”: what is this fake news relayed by Trump?
The FBI denounces a Russian destabilization operation
Having gone viral, the 20-second clip can still be viewed on X. We see a man saying: “We are from Haiti. We arrived in America six months ago, and we already have American citizenship – we vote for Kamala Harris,” in a robotic voice. He then claims that he and his friends voted in several counties and shows a series of driver's licenses.
“This is false and an example of the targeted disinformation we have seen during this election,” Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said in a statement. “We checked the electoral lists. There is no match. The IDs are fake and there is no way the people in the video voted in Georgia using those IDs,” said Mike Hassinger, a state government spokesman.
Suspicions of interference were confirmed by the Federal Police (FBI), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) in a joint statement on Friday.
“The intelligence community concludes that Russian agents of influence fabricated a recent video falsely showing individuals claiming to be from Haiti and voting illegally in multiple Georgia counties,” according to the text. “This activity on the part of Russia is part of a broader framework of attempts by Moscow to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the American elections and to fuel divisions between Americans,” affirm these federal agencies.
Kamala Harris online
On Facebook, dozens of groups also appear to be favorable to Kamala Harris, but broadcast racist attacks or promote her rival Donald Trump. The American Sunlight Project (ASP), which brings together researchers fighting disinformation, analyzed more than 300 of these groups on the Meta platform. However, these disinformation pages do not appear to be the result of an organized campaign.
“These are normally pages where trust between people is high, they are more inclined to believe what is shared there, whether it is electoral misinformation, miracle cures or memes,” he told the AFP Nina Jankowicz, co-founder of ASP. If the phenomenon seems to target political actors from all sides, including the Republican candidate in the November 5 election, the pages devoted to Kamala Harris have “exploded” since she entered the presidential race last summer , continues Nina Jankowicz.
A group dedicated to “Kamala Harris fans” declares in its section “who are we?” » that the vice-president is a “pioneer, a symbol of diversity, an activist for justice and equality”.
But the messages posted seem to want to harm her, such as a photograph of a woman smearing her face with black paint, with the words: “Kamala is preparing to speak to African-Americans”. An echo of the words of Donald Trump who said that Kamala Harris, the first black vice-president of Asian descent in the United States, had “become black” to better appeal to the African-American electorate.
“As we move closer to Election Day and the tumultuous transition that is expected to follow, it is important that people take a break and be more thoughtful when consuming content,” insists Nina Jankowicz.
