US presidential debate: what misinformation have we seen so far?
In the early hours of tomorrow morning, the two US presidential nominees will go head-to-head in their first live debate ahead of polling day on 5 November.
Republican former president Donald Trump will go up against Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris at 9pm tonight EDT or 2am UK time. From this side of the pond, you can watch it live on the BBC News channel or Channel 4.
The event will last for 90 minutes with two commercial breaks in which the nominees will not be allowed to speak with campaign staff. There will be no studio audience, no opening statements and only the two moderators can ask questions.
Each candidate is allowed two minutes to answer each question, a two minute rebuttal and an additional minute to follow up, clarify or respond. Candidates’ microphones will be muted outside of their time.
While Full Fact normally sticks to checking claims made by or about UK politicians, we’ve written about a flurry of misinformation involving the two presidential candidates circulating on social media over the last few months.
Following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the election race, we’ve debunked a number of claims relating to Ms Harris. A video from the Democratic National Convention (DNC) was shared without crucial context to claim California did not assign any delegates to Ms Harris. In reality, the state assigned 482 delegates to her.
According to some false posts, CNN’s fact check of her DNC speech showed she lied 113 times, but in truth the outlet only analysed five claims.
Perhaps one of the most significant claims we’ve debunked about Ms Harris is that she is not eligible to be president, based on her parents not being citizens at the time of her birth, but this is not true. Ms Harris was born in California, and meets the description of a ‘natural born citizen’, which means she is eligible to run.
Much of what we’ve debunked has involved misleading images and videos.
This includes an edited image appearing to show Ms Harris smiling next to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, but the actual photo shows her alongside her husband, Douglas Emhoff. Other posts share what appear to be AI-generated images with claims they showed her as a sex worker.
Similarly, it’s possible AI was used in a video to lip sync audio of someone doing an impression of Ms Harris to original footage of her giving a speech in 2023. Another edited video appeared to show Ms Harris and her running mate, Tim Walz, in front of a poster for the Revolutionary Communists of America. The real version showed a sign referencing Mr Walz’s previous role as a high school football coach.
We’ve also seen many false claims about Mr Trump, mostly in the wake of the assassination attempt against him in July.
Several of the claims support conspiracy theories that the incident was somehow staged or faked, for example a photo that has been edited to show secret service agents smiling at the scene and false claims they weren’t wearing earpieces, or old images of the former president being shared to suggest he wasn’t genuinely injured in the attack.
We also checked posts attributing comments about Islam and Ukraine to him supposedly from his speech at the Republican National Convention—but we could find no evidence of him ever saying the quotes publicly.
While we’re a UK-based fact checking organisation, we’ll continue to monitor US politics, including the debate, and especially where we encounter online misinformation. You can also follow our fellow fact checkers working in the US.
No other debates between Ms Harris and Mr Trump are currently planned ahead of November’s election. There is due to be a single debate between rival running mates JD Vance and Tim Walz on 1 October.