Why It Matters That Trump Falsely Said a Harris Rally Was Fake: NPR

One of the hotly debated topics in this presidential campaign is whether or not the crowds at the rallies are real.

Last week, at an airplane hangar in Detroit, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, stepped off Air Force Two to a cheer from thousands of supporters. NPR’s Tamara Keith I was there to see it.

According to the Harris campaign, the rally was attended by 15,000 people. Photos and videos from attendees and media organizations captured the crowd from many angles.

But former President Donald Trump and his supporters have falsely claimed that the crowd seen in a rally photo in front of Harris’s plane was a product of generative artificial intelligence. On Sunday, Trump made the outlandish claim that the actual crowd at the event was a fabrication.

“Did anyone notice that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” reads one of her post on Truth Social “There was no one on the plane, and she “created” it with AI, and showed a huge “crowd” of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!”

When asked by a reporter Wednesday why he made the claim, given that it turned out to be false, Trump did not acknowledge that his claim was false. “Well, I can’t tell you what was there, who was there,” Trump said in an exchange televised by Fox News. “I can tell you ours, we have the largest crowd ever in the history of politics.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Harris’s campaign confirmed to NPR that the photo in question was taken by a campaign staffer and was not altered by artificial intelligence.

The “Liar’s Dividend”

The refusal to accept basic, verifiable facts has raised concerns among some observers that if former President Donald Trump loses, the false claims of a stolen election from 2020 will be repeated.

Scholars studying deepfakes have stressed that the existence of the technology means People can try to claim that authentic videos and photos are fakeIn 2018, law professors Robert Chesney and Danielle Citron even coined a term for this phenomenon, calling it, “The Liar’s Dividend.”

Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in forensic imaging, ran the Harris campaign rally photo through two computer models to check for signs of patterns consistent with generative AI or manipulation, but none were found.

“This is an example where the very existence of deepfakes and generative AI allows people to deny reality,” Farid said. “You don’t like the fact that Harris Walz had such a large audience? No problem. The photos are fake. The videos are fake. Everything is fake.”

Farid said such claims muddy the waters, which “is a pretty good strategy if you want to create doubts among voters.”

Senator Bernie Sanders, who is an independent but sides with the Democrats, said in a declaration Tuesday that Trump’s false comments at Harris’s rally are a sign he’s laying the groundwork to claim the election was stolen if he loses.

“If you can convince your supporters that thousands of people who attended a televised rally don’t exist, it won’t be hard to convince them that the election results in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere are ‘false’ and ‘fraudulent,’” Sanders wrote.

The rally photo looked unusual, Farid acknowledged, because of the lighting and compression. But the features that social media users pointed to as evidence that the photo wasn’t authentic weren’t accurate, Farid said. The distorted hands that some social media posts highlighted were the product of a low-resolution version of the photo circulating online.

Farid said he was concerned about the ongoing online debate over the photo’s veracity, given the lack of evidence that it is not authentic and the fact that there are numerous photos and videos showing the size of the crowd at the demonstration.

“This is a picture of one event in one city in one day,” Farid said. “I mean, what hope do we have of actually addressing complex problems in society if we can’t agree on this?”

Democracy without shared facts

It’s a problem for citizens of a democracy to have a confused understanding of what’s real and what’s staged, said Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, during a round table hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation on Monday.

“If voters tend to disbelieve everything they see and think everything they see might be false, then they will distrust their instincts about what the truth is in order to make competent decisions,” Hasen said.

In response to one of Trump’s fake posts about the rally photo, Harris’ campaign posted a video from the Detroit rally with the caption: “In case you forgot @realdonaldtrump: this is what a rally in a swing state looks like.”

While not on the same level as those who claim the mob was fabricated, Harris’s campaign published its own social media posts about a Trump rally that gave an imprecise impressionAs Trump said in Atlanta earlier this month, Harris’ campaign highlighted what looked like a larger crowd for Harris days earlier at the same location. But the images of Trump’s crowd were taken when the venue was still filling up, before all the seats were taken.

Trump’s false claim that Harris “cheated” with a fake crowd likely resonated with his supporters, who also believe the false claim that Democrats stole the 2020 election, said Mert Bayar, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.

“It’s part of a belief system that doesn’t trust the other side,” Bayar said.

Furthermore, as the presidential race has shifted with Harris and Walz leading the Democratic field, many Trump supporters are looking for evidence that their candidate still has the upper hand.

“The vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service to people to maintain their beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary,” wrote Mike Caulfield, who has studied how rumors spread, in his newsletter, The End(s) of Argumenton false claims regarding Harris’ image at the rally.

As Caulfield warns, it’s hard for people to honestly make sense of reality when we’re “inundated with cheap, fabricated, or misrepresented evidence,” as happened after the 2020 election and is happening again during this election campaign.