As the debate over fake news rages on, a viral video that seems to have been staged was splashed all over various news sites.
Filmed from the headcam of a motorcyclist, it shows a woman furiously confronting a van full of men who catcalled her. After a tense interaction at a set of traffic lights, in which one man asks her if she’s on her period, the woman follows the van down the street. In a fury, she tears the wing mirror from the side of the van.
First things first: catcalling and street harassment happen regularly. Many women can tell a tale similar to this one in which they have felt threatened by men in a car or a van while cycling or walking. The video itself is viral dynamite – there’s a delicious satisfaction in seeing the woman tear off her harassers’ wing mirror. Naturally, it featured on many major news sites on Wednesday.
Websites including the Sun, the Mirror, the MailOnline, Mashable, the Evening Standard and the Telegraph ran pieces on the original video. Later on Wednesday afternoon, the Sun spoke to a builder named Scott Deane who said he believed it had been staged.
He told them: “I was across the road having a break and I saw this very attractive girl with a bike talking to a blonde guy who was giving her instructions.
“Then three guys dressed in orange site clothes turned up in a van and the blonde bloke was giving them instructions, too.
“He was telling the girl: ‘You need to ride behind the van aggressively.’
But even before this witness came forward a few things made the video seem suspect. It’s extremely convenient that the motorcyclist managed to capture the whole thing – though, as many motorcyclists wear helmet cameras, it’s not impossible. Some people also pointed out that it’s a bit difficult to pull off a wing mirror so easily.
The video itself seems to follow a model often seen on prankster sites that create outrageous situations and film them with the intention of going viral. Take Trollstation, for example.
Its Facebook page is full of videos in which performers act out topical and controversial situations in real life, normally surrounded by confused people going about their day. Usually they are framed as “social experiments”. Last year Trollstation made one such video in which a woman was hit with a sugar bottle after slapping a man at the Million Women Rise march in Trafalgar Square.
While this video bears similarities in tone, it’s not quite as simple as that. Usually, videos are licensed by companies after they go viral. Those companies then sell them on to news organisations. In this case, the video was uploaded directly by one such company, Viral Thread, which is owned by Jungle Creations.
On its website Jungle Creations says: “We create and curate the best content on the internet to entertain and engage our audience of over 21 million followers.”
Jungle Creations has denied it created the video. Co-founder Paul Beiboer told the Evening Standard: “We couldn’t verify its authenticity, but we don’t think it’s fake.”
The Guardian emailed Jungle Creations’ licensing department, which said:
As we receive hundreds of submissions daily and are only recently establishing our licensing team [this] means we do not have the resources available to do in-depth checks on every piece of content we get sent. At this stage in our licensing setup, that is as much as we can help you with.
Jungle Creations then outlined its fees to feature the video on the Guardian website – £400 for an in-house player and £150 for its social media channels.
When the Guardian asked to see an unblurred, not-for-publication, version of the video to do its own verification, or even speak to the person who filmed it, Jungle Creations did not respond.
Others online have questioned whether the video is real. According to one exchange on YouTube, on an account listed as an official Jungle Creations account, the video was taken off a subreddit dedicated to dashcam videos because users felt it may have been staged.
The video posted on Viral Thread’s Facebook page has now been taken down, as has the copy on YouTube.
If what a witness told the Sun is true, this could be revealed as a big viral stunt shortly, unless someone from the video comes forward to vouch for its authenticity.
Either way, it shows how unverified viral videos can make their way quickly to the front pages of some of the world’s biggest websites.
