In a deepfake election, America is going to the trolls not the polls

You’ve probably heard how Donald Trump likes to mock Kamala Harris with juvenile taunts over her race: “I didn’t know she was black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn black,” he gleefully teased, to gasps and cries of outrage in a roomful of hundreds of black journalists.

“So I don’t know, is she Indian, or is she black?” Implying that she claims one or the other, like flags of convenience, to suit her political need.

For the record, Harris’ mother is an immigrant from India and her father a black immigrant from Jamaica. Harris was born in the US and says she’s both Indian and black and always has been.

But the much bigger faux revelation about Kamala Harris is that she’s really a man, did you know?

“She’s secretly a man and couldn’t have gotten to where she’s gotten without being secretly transgender because she’s so powerful, you know?” explains an authority on disinformation and abuse of women, Nina Jankowicz, who served briefly as the inaugural head of the US government’s Disinformation Governance Board. “And they’ll photoshop and make her portrait more masculine - like they’ll add an Adam’s apple, add some five o’clock shadow,” she tells me. “And there’s this whole elaborate QAnon narrative that she’s secretly a man named Kamal Aroush and she underwent a sex change secretly and that she’s an MI5 plant like it’s just, it’s bizarre.”

Bizarre, but not entirely new. When Hillary Clinton was running for the presidency in 2016, she and husband Bill were subject to a truly silly 2016 conspiracy theory that they were sexually abusing children and trafficking them through a suburban pizza parlour in Washington DC. The controversy was called “Pizzagate”.

So what’s new? Quite a lot, actually. First, it’s now accepted that women in public life suffer insult and abuse that’s different from that suffered by men. Before Jankowicz led a path-breaking 2021 study on the subject for the Wilson Centre in Washington, “People said ‘oh, this isn’t a thing, why does it need its own separate moniker, it’s just disinformation”’.

The Jankowicz study found that “gendered and sexualised disinformation is a phenomenon distinct from broad-based gendered abuse”. The most pernicious finding was that such abuse was not just hateful and hostile but “aimed at deterring women from participating in the public sphere”.

Online abuse of men aims to discredit, diminish, demoralise individuals but no one seriously expects it to drive men from the public square.

Second, the online abuse campaigns against Harris today are more sexualised than those against Hillary Clinton eight years ago, says Jankowicz. Partly that’s because online attacks on older women are less sexualised – Harris is a decade younger than Clinton was at the time of her run for the presidency.

But it’s also because she’s not white. “I think Clinton faced a lot more about her fitness for office, her alleged corruption, her likeability, whereas Harris is facing these sexualised narratives, which I would hypothesise are compounded by the fact that she’s black. Like, since she’s black, it kind of ties into this narrative that black women are objects, which is quite pervasive here in the States.”

The dominant Republican attack on Harris is that she’s a “diversity hire”, implying that she owes her position to tokenism, chosen for being a black woman rather than for any talent.

Kamala Harris at a campaign event in Michigan on Wednesday.Credit: Bloomberg

Her two compounding minority identities of female and non-white – or “intersecting identities” in the argot of identity politics – come together in Trump not only mocking her race but also saying that European leaders would treat her like a “plaything”.

“But then overall,” says Jankowicz, “I would just say this sort of abuse and rhetoric has become so much more normalised than it was in 2016.” Politicians have embraced it without facing any consequences; and the big online businesses feed on it.

For instance, when the US House moved to censure Republican Ted Yoho for calling Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez a “f------ bitch” on the Capitol steps, the motion failed, his abuse implicitly tolerated.

And the online corporations largely have given up their pretence at trying to impose any kind of civility on their platforms, says Jankowicz.

Most egregious is Elon Musk, the owner of X, formerly Twitter. In violation of his own company’s supposed policies, he posted a deepfake video of Kamala Harris on his personal account. The video is manipulated to show Harris describing herself as “the ultimate diversity hire”, among other things. Musk enthused that it was “amazing”. It soon amassed over 100 million views.

If the owner of one of the major “social media” platforms gleefully publishes on his personal account deepfakes of the country’s vice-president debasing herself, what chance is there that any standards of truth or decorum can prevail in this ecosystem?

“I don’t know whether I was more disappointed by the platform itself or by the fact that our legislators have got nothing on the books to deal with this kind of thing – this has been called the ‘deepfake election’ and there’s nothing on the books, nothing,” says Jankowicz, who is planning some appearances in Australia later this month to discuss her book How to Lose the Information War: Russia, Fake News and the Future of Conflict.

Even the most basic scrutiny of the platforms which are nominally “social media” but functionally “social misery” is at a low point. The mechanisms for researchers to study the platforms – application programming interfaces – have been shut down or, in the case of Musk’s X, made available only on payment of a fee of $US40,000. The big corporations prefer to be opaque against systematic probing.

And what’s the relationship between the different elements of this political-industrial abuse complex?

Do politicians’ words promote online abuse campaigns en masse? They can and do. When the Republican Senator Josh Hawley accused Jankowicz of acting as an official censor in her previous post as head of the US Disinformation Governance Board – satirised as the Ministry of Truth – the storm of abuse that followed led Jankowicz to block 650,000 Twitter accounts.

Do these sorts of online abuses then translate into real-world attacks? They can and do. The online campaign against Jankowicz motivated a stalker who began physically harassing her. When the stalker “started showing interest in my young son”, as Jankowicz puts it, she took out a protection order against him.

The Pizzagate conspiracy campaign built to smear Hillary Clinton is another example. An armed man walked into the pizza parlour one day in 2016 demanding to see the children locked in the back room and fired a shot at an employee. And it mushroomed into a far larger set of dangerous, far-right conspiracies known as the QAnon network, which flourishes today.

The social misery industry magnifies the reach and intensity of a political attack, and the politicians who alone have power to regulate the industry are the beneficiaries of its online savagery. So the politicians and the trolls follow each other into a downward spiral of hostility and abuse that they find mutually gratifying but that plunge the country into a mire of mistruth and malice.

Trump is the godfather of the right-wing abuse ring, but doesn’t he fear that his attacks on Harris will alienate the centrist voters he needs? He conceded to reporters on Friday (Australian time) that “it’s possible that I won’t do as well with black women”.

Illustration: Jim Pavlidis

But, he continued: “I do seem to do very well with other segments.” His standing with Hispanics, Jewish voters and white men had improved, he said: “White males have gone through the roof.” It’s not only the left that plays identity politics; Trump is consciously playing identity politics, divisively, destructively, calculatedly.

“It’s not surprising that a misogynist would care more about the opinion of men than women,” remarks Jankowicz.

But the Democrats, too, can play the political-industrial abuse complex for advantage. An online troll recently fabricated a supposed confession by Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, that he’d had a sexual experience with a couch.

Harris’ freshly appointed vice-presidential candidate, Tim Walz, this week told a rally that he was keen to debate Vance: “That is, if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up.” When the crowd reacted, he played it up: “You see what I did there?”

He was forgetting Michelle Obama’s adage that “when they go low, we go high”. It’s hard to go high in a system where it seems everyone is slipping into the mire.

Peter Hartcher is political editor.

The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.