Fact Check: CNN Did NOT Publish Article Saying Over 75,000 Write-In Votes Went To ‘Hawk Tuah’ Or ‘Talk Tuah’

Did CNN publish an article saying more than 75,000 voters wrote in “Hawk Tuah” or “Talk Tuah” on their ballot papers? No, that’s not true: Searches of the cnn.com website turned up no headlines containing the vulgar “Hawk Tuah” expression. A CNN representative also confirmed to Lead Stories that the image in a social media post was a fake.

The claim appeared in a post on X on November 6, 2024, with the caption “are you for real” (archived here). It showed the CNN Politics banner with a headline that read:

Over 75,000 of the counted votes were write-ins for ‘Hawk Tuah’ and ‘Talk Tuah’

This is how the post looked on X at the time of writing:

(Source: X screenshot taken on Thu Nov 7 15:02:30 UTC 2024)

Lead Stories searched the CNN.com website on November 7, 2024 (archived here), and turned up no instances of the words “Hawk Tuah” in any headlines. On the same day, the list of stories written by CNN Politics reporter Stephen Collinson (archived here), whom the X post credits as the article’s author, did not include such a title.

In an email to Lead Stories on November 7, 2024, CNN Senior Vice president of Communications Emily Kuhn said:

That’s a fabricated image and CNN never reported anything related to that.

(You can also tell from the font that it’s been photoshopped)

In a separate email, Kuhn added:

(Stephen Collinson is also a longform analyst for us – he wouldn’t write a story like that even if that was true.)

“Hawk Tuah” is “onomatopoeia for the sound of spitting”. A woman named Haliey Welch, whose photo appears at the bottom of the post on X, used it in a description of sex in a video that went viral in June 2024 (see the 9:51 mark). In September 2024, Welch capitalized on her newfound fame by launching a podcast on YouTube titled “Talk Tuah,” which aims to “bring out the most candid and completely unfiltered sides of both Haliey and her guests,” according to the “About” section.

More Lead Stories fact checks on claims about CNN can be found here. Debunks of claims surrounding the 2024 U.S. presidential election are here.