Did a viral image of Taylor Swift capture her crying "on live television the moment the race was called for President Trump" in November 2024? No, that's not true: The picture was a screenshot of a Swift interview aired 12 years earlier. In it, Swift was reacting to questions about her personal life, not politics.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on Threads on November 8, 2024. It said:
Taylor Swift broke down in tears onlive television the moment the racewas called for President Trump.Looks like Taylor was wrong about aguy again!
This is what the post looked like on Threads at the time of writing:
(Source: Threads screenshot taken on Tue Nov 12 14:54:46 2024 UTC)
This was posted three days after the 2024 U.S. presidential election (archived here). In reality the singer's emotions were unrelated to the outcome of the race.
The image was a screenshot from "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" (archived here). That episode aired over a decade ago.
One of the earliest versions of the clip found by Lead Stories was uploaded to YouTube on November 10, 2012. In it, the singer yelled "stop" to protest against questions about her dating life.
(Source: YouTube screenshot taken on Tue Nov 12 19:00:50 2024 UTC)
The episode appears to have been recorded a few weeks earlier. A different clip uploaded on YouTube on October 25, 2012 (archive here), by the show's official account showed Swift in the same peach dress. According to IMDb (archived here), the show broadcast her concert on that day.
In 2023, when the same footage resurfaced online, Buzzfeed (archived here) and the New York Post (archived here) identified it as having originally aired in 2012 too.
The screenshot reappeared (archived here) on the internet again in 2024 after Swift had endorsed Kamala Harris for president (archived here).
Lead Stories fact checks of claims about Taylor Swift can be found here. Other Lead Stories fact checks of the claims concerning the 2024 U.S. presidential election can be found here.
