New York [USA], Oct. 21 : A recent viral YouTube video of a social experiment showing the "black community is very violent towards Donald Trump and his supporters" has been found to be fake.
The video of a group of black men destroying a Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump supporter's car went viral after being picked up by conservative media.
The video was staged by YouTube "star" Joey Salads, a 22-year-old whose real name is Joseph Saladino, widely known on YouTube for his "prank" videos, which regularly rack up millions of views.
In the video, he explains how his "social experiment" will show how black people behave violently toward Donald Trump.
During introduction in the video Salads is seen as saying, "I got a car, put some Trump apparel on it, and we're gonna park it in a black neighborhood and see what happens." After the intro, 30 minutes pass, according to the video.
Then, captured by what appears to be hidden-camera footage, a black man with his face blurred walks up to the car.
He calls up friends, and within 15 minutes the man is joined by four other black men, who then attack the car with a metal pipe and a rock.
After smashing the car's windows while ripping off some of the Trump signs attached to the car, they run away.
"As you can see from this video, the black community is very violent toward Trump and his supporters," Salads says at the end of the video.
Within hours of its posting to Salads' more than 1.4 million YouTube subscribers, the video went viral, racking up more than a million views.
Later it was discovered that the whole video was staged as an eyewitness, Pedro Torres, said he was on the fifth floor of a building in Staten Island's Park Hill neighborhood and saw the video being shot in a parking lot outside.
"To be honest with you I was just chilling and I look outside the window and see Joey," Torres, 17, told The Daily Beast.
"I [know he's] known for aking shitty vids, and I [know] they were all fake. I wanted to show the world that the videos were actually fake." Torres took out his phone and filmed Salads shooting the intro of the video, catching the black men who spontaneously found and attacked the car were actually waiting behind the camera tripod.
The men's clothing matches the exact outfits of the men filmed in the video. Viewers also noticed that the metal pipe used to smash the car mysteriously appears in the shot after Salads finishes his intro.
Torres waited to share his clips until after Salads posted his video, then tweeted his phone footage out to popular YouTube duo h3h3Productions, who have criticized Salads in the past.
Within hours, other internet personalities picked up on the fakery, and Salads was getting dragged left and right on social media.
When reached by email, Salads said he was "sorry," but that he wasn't "gonna answer any more questions," and referred The Daily Beast to his latest apology video.
In this latest apology video, Salads says he's turned the "Trump Car" video to private, which he says has cost him "thousands of dollars" in ad revenue from YouTube.
He also claims that his whole original plan was to go to "these black communities" and donate thousands of dollars to homeless shelters and orphanages.
Source: ANI
