"Not true": Univision debunks Trump's Harris town hall teleprompter conspiracy theory

A low-res Trump campaign video circulated on X, claiming Harris used a teleprompter to answer unscripted questions

By Griffin Eckstein

News Fellow

Published October 11, 2024 3:06PM (EDT)

US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris arrives to speak at a campaign rally at the Bojangles Coliseum in Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 12, 2024. (JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris arrives to speak at a campaign rally at the Bojangles Coliseum in Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 12, 2024. (JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)

Univision producers debunked the Trumpworld conspiracy theory that Vice President Kamala Harris used a teleprompter in a recent town hall. 

Donald Trump’s campaign posted a clip on Thursday of the town hall's Univision broadcast. The low-res snippet of the broadcast shows a teleprompter displaying text during Harris' answer to an audience member before quickly blinking out. 

That video was quickly amplified by conservative commentators like Greg Price, Benny Johnson and Vivek Ramaswamy. Those accounts accused Harris of making use of the prompter to answer questions from the audience, asked in English and Spanish, causing Univision producers to set the record straight late Thursday night. 

“That’s not true. The teleprompter that displays a text written in Spanish was a support element for the town hall moderator,” Univison News President Daniel Coronell wrote on X. “I can tell you this with first-hand knowledge because I was in charge of the television program.”

Town hall moderator Enrique Acevado chimed in to issue a correction, noting that “the prompter displayed my introduction (in Spanish) and then it switched to a timer. Any claim to the contrary is simply untrue.”

The clip that traveled around X is a lower resolution than the broadcast video available on YouTube. In the original clip, the text on the teleprompter screen is clearly in Spanish.

It's not the first time that misinformation from X, formerly Twitter, has made it into this year's presidential election. The platform was the birthplace of JD Vance and Donald Trump’s now-infamous lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

A September analysis showed that rampant misinformation on the site was frequently boosted by Musk, who advanced at least 17 false narratives and amplified five of the most prolific lie-spreaders on the platform.


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