Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign isn’t using artificial intelligence to manipulate crowd photos of campaign events, but unchecked TikTok videos repeating the blatantly false conspiracy theory are racking up millions of views.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump posted the AI claim to his Truth Social platform on August 11, writing that there was a “massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers” in a photo of an August 7 Harris campaign rally stop in Detroit, “BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!” Citing “the reflection of the mirror like finish on the Vice Presidential Plane,” Trump added, “She had NOBODY waiting, and the ‘crowd’ looked like 10,000 people! Same thing is happening with her fake ‘crowds’ at her speeches.”

Snopes confirmed that the photo Trump referenced “was real and, according to the Harris-Walz campaign, taken by a staff member.” Similarly, AP described Trump’s claims as “false” and reported that photographers and video journalists representing The Associated Press, as well as other news organizations, documented the crowd size.

However, Trump’s post sparked the spread of mass misinformation on TikTok, prompting users to post their own unfounded conspiracy theories about the Harris campaign using AI to increase the visible crowd size in photos of the event.

In one TikTok video with over 3 million views, a user argued that the reflection of Harris’ plane is evidence that there was no crowd present at the campaign event. (“Other photographic and video evidence corroborated the large crowd size,” Snopes noted, explaining, “In the AP photos and other media, a roof hangar gives a shadow over the crowd — in other words, part of the crowd that's closer to the aircraft is visible and the people underneath the roof are not as easy to see.”)

Another TikTok video with over 1.3 million views used the same reflection claim, writing in overlaid text, “BREAKING REPORT: Harris campaign BUSTED using FAKE crowd photo at campaign rally stop.”

In a TikTok video with over 3.7 million views, a user claimed that “Kamala’s Social Media team bout to get fired for obvious AI use” and then pointed to images of dark phones and hands as proof that the photo was AI-generated. But as Snopes reported, “AI-detection software said it was highly unlikely the photo was created with AI,” and “zooming in on some of the phone screens in the image, you can see what appears to be the plane and crowd — in other words, the phones seem to show people recording what's in front of them” at the rally.

In the short time Harris has led the campaign as the likely Democratic presidential nominee, she has faced a barrage of misogynistic and racist attacks on TikTok, as well as digitally altered audio wrongly attributed to her.

Update (8/15/24): Following the publication of this article, a TikTok spokesperson told Media Matters: “TikTok enforces firm policies against harmful misinformation, and is working aggressively to remove and help prevent the spread of this content while partnering with fact-checkers to assess the accuracy of claims in real-time.”