Anika Begay
On Wednesday, Kamala Harris’s campaign page shared a post from Donald Trump’s Truth Social. In it, Trump blamed “the complexity of modern equipment” for making his voice sound “a little different and weird” during a live X interview with Elon Musk. But while Harris’s campaign shared what appeared to be a screenshot of the post, it cut out the last line, in which Trump explained that he had released “an actual and perfect recording of the conversation.”
It’s not entirely clear why the original broadcast sounded so strange: The Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday about what led to the sound quality issues and what technology they used to fix them. But the Harris campaign’s post omitted key context that Trump had released a cleaner version of the recording, making the post seem purely an apology. “Trump blames his garbled, insult-filled mess of an interview with Elon Musk on ‘the complexity of modern equipment,’” the KamalaHQ account wrote alongside the truncated Threads post.
It’s not the only example of subtle narrative changes the campaign has made to put itself in a more favorable light, or Donald Trump in a less favorable one. On Tuesday, Axes reported that the campaign purchased several advertisements linking to news from sources such as The Associated Press, CNNAND USA Today that appear at the top of Google search results pages. While these sponsored links take users to actual news articles, the headline and text of the ads are written by the campaign, even though they are presented by Google in a way that appears to be written by the broadcaster itself. Google allows this, and Harris’ campaign is certainly not the first to use this tactic. But Facebook actually got rid of a similar feature in 2017 after The Wall Street Journal reported examples of advertisers modifying news site headlines in promoted content. Google’s ad library shows that the Trump campaign has not run any ads on Google Search.
The headlines are much more enthusiastic than they appear on most news sites. “VP Harris Protects Democracy – Trump Defends Jan. 6 Comments,” reads a Harris-sponsored headline that links to The IndependentIt is not clear which specific article this was linked to, but The Independent was not happy. A spokesperson said they would seek to have the ads removed and that it was “completely wrong for anyone to put false headlines under The Independent brand. We fiercely oppose it and believe it is undermining what politics and journalism should be.”
Trump, of course, has made far grander, more numerous, and more deceptive claims throughout his campaign. He recently falsely claimed that Harris had “AI” a crowd of thousands who showed up to see her at a rally in Michigan. He also created a false narrative that Harris “went black” because she aspired to higher office. Harris attended the historically black Howard University, and her father is Jamaican-American.
Harris’s campaign has generally favored the informal language and style of modern social media, quickly adopting the “brat” aesthetic in a nod to Charli XCX’s hit album, for example. It’s raising a new set of questions about how to fairly present information and how viewers process internet content. Is an incomplete quote in what appears to be a social media screenshot different from a carefully edited audio snippet in an attack ad? For Harris’s campaign, the answer appears to be NO.
Harris’s campaign declined to comment.
