The internet was already spewing racist and sexist attacks long before Vice President Kamala Harris began her presidential campaign this month, including during the campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Since the last presidential election, however, it has become even more virulent and more central to American politics.
In 2008, Obama faced an ecosystem in which Facebook had millions of users, not billions, and the iPhone had barely been on the market for a year. In 2016, Clinton’s campaign policed a handful of social media platforms, not dozens. In 2020, when Harris was Joe Biden’s running mate, it was much harder to use artificial intelligence to produce the fake pornographic depictions and misleading videos she is now said to appear in.
In just one week since Harris — who is Black, of Indian descent and a woman — became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, false narratives and conspiracy theories about her have appeared here and there across the digital landscape.
A lot has changed ahead of the 2024 election. Now, those claims have been turbocharged, fueled by an increasingly aggressive tone of political discourse backed by high-level politicians, driven by AI and other new technologies, and spread across a far more fragmented online landscape filled with unmoderated platforms.
“The political sphere has been sexist and racist for a long time. What has changed is the media ecosystem in which that problematic rhetoric grows,” said Meg Heckman, an associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University. “It’s almost as if there are multiple parallel media universes, so we’re not all operating from a shared set of facts.”
The attacks on Harris reflect the continuing rarefaction of political debate, a movement of explicit vulgarity and intolerance that is coming out of the shadows and into the public eye. Experts fear that this shift will erode society, as it could deter potential candidates from running for office and alienate voters from the democratic process.
Usha Vance, the Indian-American wife of Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, has also been the target of racist attacks online, including from Nick Fuentes, a well-known white supremacist and anti-Semite who was recently allowed back on the social media platform by Elon Musk, owner of X. Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina who ran unsuccessfully against former President Donald Trump this year, has also faced a barrage of attacks related to her gender and Indian heritage.
It’s hard to quantify the success of online vitriol among voters. Some voters, especially those exposed to aggressive language from Trump and his supporters, may be “numb to these kinds of attacks because they’ve become normalized,” said Nina Jankowicz, executive director of the American Sunlight Project, a nonprofit that studies disinformation and who has also been a victim of the right’s online fury.
“It will be difficult for Republican Party leaders to put the genie back in the bottle, no matter how hard they try,” he said.
It remains to be seen whether the attacks will have any effect on voters’ opinion of Harris or whether awareness of such content will increase and it can be dismissed.
In many ways, the false claims about Harris resemble those faced by her predecessors, but warped and amplified by the current structure of the internet and with a double dose of toxicity because of Harris’s race and gender. In the past week, the vice president has been attacked online with baseless questions about her black race and her suitability to be president — two racist attacks that also occurred against Obama.
These falsehoods were embraced by fringe right-wing platforms like Truth Social and Rumble, which in recent years have become highly influential conduits into mainstream forums, with minimal moderation and oversight.
Sexist messages also claim that Harris owes her success to men. Hillary Clinton was the subject of a similar narrative during her long career: she was accused of having taken advantage of her marriage to occupy high-level positions. This week, these ideas found enthusiastic support on Telegram and Gab, two platforms that surged in popularity in 2021, when Facebook cracked down on extremist content and forced far-right Trump supporters to seek other channels on the internet.
Harris has also been targeted with false claims that she is a transgender woman, a conspiracy theory that has been leveled against many prominent women in politics. Such falsehoods have circulated unchecked on X for much of the 21 months that Musk, a frequent critic of transgender rights, has owned the platform.
“A lot of airtime is devoted to this kind of sexist and hate speech,” said Dhanaraj Thakur, research director at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology. His nonpartisan advocacy group analyzed more than 100,000 X-rated posts about congressional candidates in 2020 and found that women of color were twice as likely as white candidates to be the target of online misrepresentation and disinformation and four times as likely to experience violent threats online.
After Biden defeated Trump in 2020, political pundits noted a clear violent trend in the language of some members of the far right, which they described as the popularization of the threat as a tool of mobilization.
Recent attacks on Harris — including calls to execute her and Biden as “enemies of the United States,” according to the Site Intelligence Group, which monitors online extremism — showed that extreme tone, particularly in some of the smaller forums that have gained traction in recent years. (Some Republican leaders have urged their colleagues to moderate their language. House Speaker Mike Johnson said last week that the election would be about “policies, not personalities,” adding that “Harris’s ethnicity and gender have nothing to do with this.”)
“Sadly, these are just the first of many more threats to come against Harris,” said Rita Katz, the group’s director and author of “Saints and Soldiers,” a book about online extremists.
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