A new campaign advert for Kamala Harris shows a child making a mess and includes voiceover of the Democrat candidate saying women have a right to choose abortion “so we don’t wind up living with a child like this”.
The video is an old John Lewis advert and the voiceover appears to have been faked.
An old advert for the UK department store John Lewis is being shared on social media with a fake voiceover supposedly by US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, with claims it is an official campaign advert.
The original advert is from 2021, and shows a child in a dress, heels and makeup making a mess around a house to the tune of the Stevie Nicks song Edge of Seventeen.
The edited version being shared online includes a Harris-Walz logo and a voiceover which sounds like Ms Harris discussing abortion rights in the US. Towards the end of the video the voice says women should have a right to decide “so we don’t wind up living with a child like this”, followed by laughter.
Several posts sharing the edited video are captioned “DISTURBING: New Kamala Harris Campaign Ad Depicts Mother Who Wishes She Had An Abortion. Watch til the end”.
We’ve not been able to determine whether the voice clip was generated with artificial intelligence, is edited in some other way or was created by an impersonator, but we’ve not seen any evidence to suggest it is a real voiceover by Ms Harris.
AI expert Professor Hany Farid told the BBC that the voiceover is AI-generated, citing clues such as the way the word “by” is pronounced.
Although the Harris-Walz campaign has featured adverts on the topic of abortion, none of them feature this voiceover.
A spokesperson for John Lewis told Full Fact they have reported the advert to X ”and asked them to take down this video urgently”.
Definitively proving that an audio clip has been faked is difficult. The emergence of this clip and others we’ve previously reported on exposes the growing difficulty posed by new technology to verification, and the challenge of ensuring an effective and proportionate response by social media platforms on such content.
Although some claims may seem obviously false, we still fact check them because it may not be clear to everyone that it is untrue, particularly more casual internet users. We’ve written about this in more detail on our blog.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as altered because the video comes from an old John Lewis advert and the voiceover appears to have been faked.
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