US Vice President Kamala Harris was wearing “earphone earrings” during the presidential debate with Donald Trump on 10 September.
There is no evidence to suggest Ms Harris wore “earphone earrings”. On close inspection it is clear she is not wearing the Nova H1 audio earrings as claimed on social media.
Claims that Vice President Kamala Harris wore “earphone earrings” during Tuesday’s presidential debate in Philadelphia are circulating on social media.
One post on X, formerly Twitter, has eight million views and claims Ms Harris was wearing ‘Nova H1 Audio Earrings’ that act as wireless earphones. The claim has also spread to Facebook, with one post shared more than 51,000 times.
But there is no evidence Ms Harris wore earrings that contained earphones, and the close up pictures of Ms Harris during the debate show her earrings do not match the Nova model referenced in the posts.
Both Ms Harris and former President Donald Trump agreed to a set of rules for the debate, which included no pre-written notes and no interactions with their staff members during commercial breaks.
Some posts implied Ms Harris cheated by wearing earphone earrings and was being “fed lines”.
Many of the posts showed a close-up of Ms Harris alongside a picture of the Nova H1 Audio Earrings, claiming they are the same. But high resolution images of Ms Harris during the debate show some clear differences between her earrings and the Nova H1 audio earrings.
Ms Harris’s earrings have two gold stalks below the pearls, which curve behind her earlobes in a “J” shape. The Nova H1 audio earrings have single stalks and a much smaller hinge bending around the earlobe.
Some confusion may have arisen from a 2023 review of the Nova H1 earrings which includes an image of a woman wearing them alongside other jewellery. The combination of the three earrings looks similar to the earring design Ms Harris wore and the image from the review features in some versions of the post.
Ms Harris has been photographed wearing similar earrings multiple times before the debate. The website What Kamala Wore claims the earrings are South Sea Pearl Earrings from the Tiffany Hardwear collection.
Claims about candidates wearing earpieces during debates are not new. In 2016 Politifact wrote a fact check correcting claims Hilary Clinton was wearing an earpiece. In 2020, Reuters debunked similar claims Joe Biden was wearing a wire during a presidential debate.
We’ve written many pieces about misinformation involving the two presidential candidates circulating on social media over the last few months.
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 false because close up images from the debate show Ms Harris is not wearing the Nova H1 audio earrings cited and there is no evidence to suggest she wore any sort of earphone earrings.
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