Laptop Mag’s Rael Hornby reported today that his publication is now seeing a surge of interest in an article it published last year about the Nova H1 Audio Earrings. The 2023 article, Kimberly Gedeon’s “These pearl earrings at CES 2023 can play music, take calls — why they're a cheater's dream”, reported that the Nova H1 Audio Earrings work like wireless earbuds: they use Bluetooth to connect to an Android or iOS phone, but they have a real pearl and a gold- or silver-plated clip so that they don’t look like earbuds. Gedeon suggests that the earrings could be used by students to cheat during a test, for example.
Gedeon’s 2023 article is seeing many readers today because of a assertion widely shared today on Facebook and X that Harris cheated during yesterday’s debate by wearing the earrings and getting advice from her team during the debate. This assertion has been fact-checked by USA Today’s Joedy McCreary who rated it “False”. Among other things, Nova went bankrupt and it’s not clear whether they ever sold any of the earrings.
Hornby’s article today, “Did Kamala Harris wear these Nova H1 Audio Earrings during the presidential debate?” investigated the right-wing assertions independently. After a detailed analysis of high-res images, Hornby writes that Harris was wearing Tiffany Hardwear 18K gold South Sea Pearl Earrings, which she has worn before in public. Harris has long worn pearl earrings; although Tiffany no longer sells this particular model, Hornby has high-quality images of what they look like.
Anticipating possible right-wing objections to this identification, Hornby writes:
While it's possible to claim that the earrings may have been modified, with the Nova H1's frame being swapped out, it's this part of the device that houses the electronics, which would leave only the pearl behind.
This new right-wing disinformation about Harris’s earrings follows a pattern, in which Fox News recently obsessed about Harris’s wired earbuds, and in September 2020 when Fox News pushed disinformation that Biden cheated by wearing a wired earpiece during a debate with Trump in the 2020 campaign.
Laptop Mag has helpfully put a warning atop Gedeon’s 2023 article, informing readers that these are not the earrings that right-wingers are looking for.
Hornby concludes with a warning:
it's a solid reminder of staying vigilant in the face of bold claims based on low-quality imagery — or even high-quality imagery in an age of generative AI where deepfake images are so easy to create.
