“Social experiment” and fake prank videos are all the rage these days—many of which are designed to stoke outrage and capitalize on the culture war. The recent viral video of a female cyclist tearing off a van’s wing mirror has been revealed as nothing more than a hoax.
Those who first blew it up and spread the video for its “empowering” feminist message go to painstaking lengths to use the video to highlight street harassment, regardless of how manufactured it was.
Filmed on a head-mounted camera, the video showed a female cyclist being catcalled by two men in a van when they’re stopped at a red light, before she promptly rips off the mirror. It did the rounds on a variety of news, sites and feminists on social media were keen to promote it as an example of a woman bravely standing up to sexism.
It first appeared on the popular Facebook page Viral Thread before finding its way onto YouTube and Twitter, amassing millions of views.
More investigative sources then dug into the origin of the video and asked questions that the page’s owner, Jungle Creations, couldn’t properly answer.
Speaking to The Sun, a construction worker who witnessed the altercation says that he saw the participants in the video staging the entire scene, and that they practiced filming it multiple times.
After the video went viral, the company initially asked for fees of up to $500 for video usage rights, but later admitted that the video may have been staged and deleted it from the page.
Jungle Creations disputes claims that they were involved in the video’s creation, and that they simply received it from a “third-party content provider.”
Instead of simply condemning the video for being fake, The Guardian claims that “catcalling and street harassment happen regularly,” and explained why it was understandable that such a video had the potential to go viral in the first place—because they happen a lot, per the popular narrative.
Those who boosted it on Facebook and Twitter have been equally hesitant to decry it for being completely manufactured, as if doing so would invalidate women’s experiences of street harassment.
In a culture where politicians like Bernie Sanders regurgitate questionable, if alarming campus sexual assault statistics, and feminist ideologues like Anita Sarkeesian champion the mantra of “Listen and Believe,” it’s no surprise that social justice proponents are keen to embrace outright lies that back up their narrative.
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.