The misinformation campaign against Kamala Harris, what you need to know

Harris was 3 years old when the school board in Berkeley voted to desegregate the district’s elementary schools. And the process of desegregation was ongoing by the time she entered the public school system in 1970. A Berkeley Unified School District spokesperson confirmed to PolitiFact California that Harris would have been part of the second class to integrate when she was bussed across town.

Harris’ policy views on guns is another area that has been distorted online. Harris supports restrictions on firearms, but her stance falls well short of highly viral posts on Facebook that claim she said she would sign an executive order directing police to "show up at your door" and collect any guns that were not surrendered. This is neither Harris’ quote nor her position.

The false claims and fake quotes about guns attributed to Harris are the biggest pieces of misinformation currently still about her, Mason told us. 

There hasn’t been a lot of new misinformation about Harris following the flurry of fabrications that bubbled up after she was announced as Biden’s running mate, experts said, but that may change following the vice presidential debate, and as Election Day inches closer.

Benjamin Decker, CEO of Memetica, a digital investigations consultancy, and former disinformation research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, told PolitiFact that the falsehoods about Harris are largely recycled disinformation attacks from the primary, with added embellishments.

"All that's missing from the Harris-disinformation packet now is manipulated video, or cheap fakes, where they edit to remove content or splice bits together to create a false narrative," Decker said. "I wouldn’t be surprised if we see that in the next couple of weeks — it’s only a matter of time because they've done everything else."

In politics, women — particularly women of color — face intense scrutiny and are often held to different or higher standards than their male counterparts, especially when running for positions in high levels of government.

"There has never been a woman president or vice president. The default image of these high-level positions of leadership is white men, with Obama being the one exception," said Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women and Politics, a unit of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University. 

"This is what happens to women when they seek those really high levels of positions of power: the questioning of their validity to even be there. They are held to a standard that men are not held to."

Attacks against female lawmakers tend to be aimed at undermining their qualifications, sometimes through sexist or racist tropes.

For example, as the youngest woman to be elected to Congress, Democratic U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been the target of countless fabrications, from fake quotes to doctored images, designed to discredit her or to make her look stupid.

But women with more experience than Ocasio-Cortez have also been targeted, including U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

"Most academic research shows women and particularly, women of color, are some of the most targeted identity groups on the internet," Decker said, "and so you have a candidate who is both a woman and a woman of color, and all this misinformation about her is just attesting and confirming that research in real-time."

"This is essentially targeted harassment," he added. "At the end of the day people are going to continue to use the things that have historically been used and focus on targeting her with misogynistic and racist memes rather than talk about the politics."