Disinformation Narratives Surge After Biden Endorses Harris for 2024 Election

On Sunday, July 21st, President Joe Biden announced that he would end his presidential re-election campaign. This decision followed calls from prominent Democrats for the President to step aside. Following the announcement, Biden endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the party's nominee. In the wake of this endorsement, a slew of narratives began to gain steam online.

Here are the findings from PeakMetrics:

• The most prominent disinformation narrative targeting Kamala Harris after President Biden withdrew from the ticket centered on racialized attacks. By 7 pm ET on Sunday, racialized narratives had surged, making up about 8.3% of all mentions of Harris. The false claims included assertions that Harris is not eligible to run for president due to her parents' citizenship, echoing the birther attacks on former President Obama, and allegations that Harris is not actually Black. This disinformation narrative gained momentum throughout Sunday, with an increasing number of posts each hour. Notably, Laura Loomer amplified this false narrative by posting that Harris "isn't Black" at 6:36 pm ET on Sunday.
• Sexualized mentions of Kamala Harris accounted for about 4.5% of all mentions of the Vice President at the 7 pm ET hour. Keywords were pulled from disinformation researcher Nina Jankowicz's research on sexualized narratives related to the abuse that women candidates face online. The sexualized narrative was slower to gain steam on Sunday compared to the racialized attacks narrative.
• A transphobic narrative falsely alleging that Kamala Harris "couldn’t have risen to a position of power without having secretly been a man" and that she had been a man named "Kamal Aroush" before transitioning did not reach wide circulation. At its peak, mentions related to this narrative reached only 150 posts on X (formerly Twitter) at 5 pm ET on Sunday, accounting for less than 0.5% of all mentions of Harris at that time.
• Claims that President Biden’s endorsement of Kamala Harris as the nominee was "undemocratic" or that it disregarded the "14 million" votes for Biden in the primaries and ignored the will of American voters peaked early on Sunday, immediately after Biden’s announcement, and slowed into the evening — even as other anti-Harris narratives gained steam online. At their peak at 3 pm ET on Sunday, these posts reached around 700 on X (Twitter), making up about 1.2% of all mentions of Harris at that hour.

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