3/20/2023 0 Comments Cnn meme creator father![]() ![]() “So I was born in Oakland, and raised in the United States except for the years that I was in high school in Montreal, Canada,” Harris responded at the time with a laugh. One of the hosts cited a meme that said Harris is “not African-American” because her parents were immigrants and she spent her high school years in Canada. In an interview with The Breakfast Club hosts DJ Envy and Charlamagne Tha God that aired in March, the show’s hosts asked the California Democrat to address a series of derogatory memes that have circulated on social media. Harris has previously answered those who have questioned her black heritage. Automation, he said, is easier to detect, while groups of Twitter users coordinating to spread a smear is more difficult and presents an even more difficult challenge for Twitter. “We saw no coordinated use of automation during recent debates,” a Twitter spokesperson said.īut Decker said that even without the use of automated accounts, it was possible that individuals coordinated to spread the attacks. “The adversarial attack on Harris’ eligibility highlights how political disinformation operators recycle narratives that have had success in the past with hyper-partisan communities,” Decker explained, adding that some of the main architects of the birther conspiracy against Obama are utilizing social media to spread similar falsehoods about Harris.Ī Twitter spokesperson told CNN Sunday that accounts attacking Harris’ race during the debate were not automatic “bots.” Harris, who was born in Oakland, California, is eligible to run for president. “By comparing Harris to Rachel Dolezal the meme creators tried to stoke identity falsehoods about Harris ‘blackness’ as well as suggesting that she is hiding the truth about who she is,” Decker told CNN on Monday.īirther conspiracy theorists have also circulated material challenging Harris’ eligibility to run for president. He then tracked how the meme spread across Twitter, Pinterest, 4chan and other platforms, writing about it for Politico earlier this year. The forum has been embraced by Trump and his circle, but last week Reddit “quarantined” the forum because of what it said were “threats of violence against police and public officials.” At the time, Decker was a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center studying online misinformation and the proliferation of extremist content across social media.ĭecker said the first instance of the meme he found online was from 2018 on the “The_Donald,” a forum for Trump supporters on Reddit. Decker, the founder of Memetica, a digital investigations consultancy, tracked a meme that tries to equate Harris to Rachel Dolezal, a white woman who portrayed herself as black.ĭecker began tracking the online conversation about Harris after she announced her candidacy in January. “It didn’t work then and it won’t work now.”īenjamin T. “This is the same type of racist attack his father used to attack Barack Obama,” Lily Adams, the campaign communications director for Harris, told CNN. Over the weekend, Harris’ campaign and some of her Democratic opponents condemned the attacks. “Don’s tweet was simply him asking if it was true that Kamala Harris was half-Indian because it’s not something he had ever heard before,” Andy Surabian, the spokesman told The Times, adding, “and once he saw that folks were misconstruing the intent of his tweet, he quickly deleted it.” ![]() told The New York Times that there had been a misunderstanding. amplified those attacks when, on Thursday, he shared a tweet sent by one user with the assertion, “Kamala Harris is *not* an American Black. ![]() Black,” one Twitter user, who was suspended from the service the following morning, tweeted at Harris soon after the California senator confronted former vice president Joe Biden about his comments on working with segregationist senators and his past opposition to busing. Soon after Harris’ debate-defining moment when she recounted being bused to school as a little girl, a swarm of Twitter accounts, many anonymous, began spreading disinformation about the senator’s race. The claim has echoes of the false birther conspiracy that was spread about President Barack Obama - and some of the same people involved in spreading that conspiracy are involved in circulating the false claims about Harris. In addition to efforts to undermine Harris’ identity as a black woman, a false claim that Harris is not eligible to run for president because both of her parents are foreign-born has also been circulating. during last week’s debate, an expert that tracks online misinformation tells CNN. Kamala Harris’ racial identity had been festering on conspiratorial corners of the internet for months before being elevated to the mainstream by Donald Trump Jr. ![]()
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