Coca-Cola cut ties with Taylor Swift over Harris endorsement? No, that's satire | Fact check

Joedy McCreary, USA TODAY
·3 min read
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The claim: Coca-Cola ended Taylor Swift sponsorship deal over Kamala Harris endorsement

A Sept. 16 Facebook post (direct link, archive link) shows side-by-side images of music superstar Taylor Swift and a Coca-Cola sign.

“Coca-Cola Cuts Ties With Taylor Swift Over Harris Endorsement, ‘We Don’t Support Her Endorsement,’" the post’s caption reads in part.

The post was shared more than 1,800 times in three days. Versions of the claim also circulated widely on Instagram and on Threads.

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Our rating: False

The claim originated on a satirical account. There is no credible evidence Swift's endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris had any effect on her relationship with the soft drink company.

Claim originated on satirical Facebook account

After months of speculation, Swift endorsed Harris in the 2024 presidential race shortly after the vice president’s Sept. 10 debate against former President Donald Trump. The music superstar’s announcement was followed by a spike in traffic to a voter-registration website and backlash from the former president.

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But contrary to the claim in the Facebook post, it did not lead Coca-Cola to terminate its sponsorship deal with the pop star. While that claim originated on an account that shares satirical content and identifies it that way, the Facebook post presents it as an authentic development.

The claim was first shared in a Sept. 14 Facebook post from the account SpaceX Fanclub, which is part of the SpaceXMania network of satirical websites. The account states in its intro section that it shares satirical content and that “nothing on this page is real.” The post’s caption identifies it as satire, and its image contains two watermarks indicating that. A longer article linked in the comments published Sept. 14 by Esspots, another website in that network, also carries a satire label.

The Sept. 16 post links to an article that is worded similarly to the one published by Esspots. But two AI-detection websites found the vast majority of the article was AI-generated, with ZeroGPT and QuillBot both determining AI was behind over 90% of it.

The Sept. 16 Facebook post is an example of what could be called "stolen satire," where claims written as satire and presented that way originally are reposted in a way that makes them appear to be legitimate news. As a result, readers of the second-generation post are misled, as was the case here.

Swift entered into an endorsement deal with Coca-Cola in January 2013 to promote Diet Coke, and the pop star produced a series of commercials for the beverage in the mid-2010s. There is nothing on the company's website about ending the relationship with Swift. A Coca-Cola spokesperson declined to provide an on-the-record comment. USA TODAY reached out to Tree Paine, Swift’s publicist, but did not immediately receive a response.

Swift endorsed President Joe Biden over Trump in the 2020 election. In 2018, she endorsed former Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, in his unsuccessful bid for a U.S. Senate seat won by Republican Marsha Blackburn.

Misinformation about Swift’s political activism is not uncommon. USA TODAY previously debunked false claims that the pop star was photographed wearing an anti-Trump T-shirt or holding pro-Trump banners inside a stadium's luxury box or on the red carpet at the Grammy Awards.

USA TODAY reached out to several social media users who shared the claim but did not immediately receive any responses.

PolitiFact also debunked the claim.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Satire behind claim Coca-Cola cut ties with Taylor Swift | Fact check

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