Some keen viewers of Tuesday night’s first — and likely only — presidential debate were paying close attention, not to what the candidates were saying, but rather to the earrings Vice President Kamala Harris was wearing. It wasn’t the style of pearl earrings, however, that caught their attention.

On Wednesday, a new conspiracy theory made the rounds on social media claiming that the vice president was wearing an earpiece that could be used to relay answers to difficult questions to her. Some users noted a similarity to the Nova H1 audio earrings developed by German startup NOVA Products.

Other social media users have noticed the similarity to Tiffany & Co.’s Double Pearl Hinged Earrings. Harris has been spotted wearing earrings of the same style in at least one nationally televised campaign video.

Accordingly NewsweekNOVA Products’ earphones were unveiled in a Kickstarter campaign in May 2023 but were never released.

“The reach of this 2021 Kickstarter product is probably huge. Sales were limited. They were re-introduced at CES 2023, but the product does not appear to have been a success,” said technology industry analyst Rob Enderle of the Enderle Group.

“Only 323 people backed this project initially and the image on the Kickstarter page looks different than what she was wearing,” Enderle added. “In my view – and The Verge seems to have confirmed this – what she is wearing is not this product, the attachment is entirely different.”

It is also questionable whether an earring would produce satisfactory results, Enderle added, noting that he has tested similar products.

“Normally, the person next to you or a microphone picks up the sound. Only bone conduction headsets work relatively silently at this distance from the ear canal and that technology is not used here,” he stressed. “The earrings she was wearing look like pearl earrings with a setting made of real gold, which is too small to conceal the technology used, even if it had been made specifically for her, which is unlikely. Earbuds that are meant to be kept secret are always in the ear and very small, so you can’t see them at all and they don’t emit any noise. This would be the wrong technology for this use case.”

Another case of disinformation

Harris is just the latest candidate to be accused of wearing an earpiece. After a debate between then-President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry in 2004, an unconfirmed rumor emerged that Bush was wearing a hidden transmitter. The story gained so much traction that it was widely covered—and to some extent debunked—by the mainstream media.

Such stories have long been circulating to undermine a candidate. What is different today is the speed with which such rumors have been able to spread quickly through social media.

“Theories like this develop and spread quickly. Sometimes they arise because a person genuinely believes something to be true or misinterprets a situation – like confusing earrings with headphones,” explains Dr. Cliff Lampe, professor of computer science and associate dean for academic affairs at the University of Michigan’s School of Information.

“Sometimes we also see hostile states trying to spread false information to sow discord,” Lampe said. “One mistake people make with targeted disinformation is that the goal is to convince people that something is true or not. Often the goal is to get people to give up on the idea of ​​truth. They give up because there is so much information floating around and rely on their identity and other heuristics to identify what is true. In research, we call this ‘artificial nihilism.'”

The fact that the earrings are being discussed at all and not what the contestants have to offer is remarkable. And social media is also to blame, as it has become a channel for spreading such misinformation.

“People see information and share it, which amplifies the content whether it’s true or not,” Lampe said. “Any medium can be used to spread false information, but because there are no gatekeepers at all on social media, this is particularly effective.”