Details of the now viral video of the Transportation Security Administration patting down a toddler in a cast have emerged, revealing the video to be more than a bit misleading.
Posted by radio programmer and podcaster Matt Dubiel over the weekend, the video was actually taken in 2010, and at Midway Airport, not at O’Hare Airport, as originally stated, reported the Chicago Tribune.
CNN, which dubbed the controversial video “the latest Rorschach test of the public’s attitude towards the TSA,” interviewed Dubiel about the toddler pat-down.
“I think the whole exercise was intrusive and disrespectful to a human being, and a three-year-old human being,” Dubiel told CNN, and explained he posted the video after rewatching the two-year old incident and “becoming enraged anew.”
As both CNN and the Chicago Tribute noted though, the TSA changed its policy of swabbing children for explosives in September of 2011, so the current outrage on the Internet is a little misplaced. The practice is no longer in effect, but that fact seems to be lost on Internet citizens.
Dubiel has gone back to his original video and changed the description to adequately reflect the time and location, but YouTubers are still using his video as a landing pad for TSA hatred.
As the Chicago Tribune pointed out, the text and commentary superimposed on the video, which has gotten everyone riled up, “paints a somewhat different picture” than what is actually going on.
“This is going to haunt him. Next thing you know he’s going to be firing an ak47 fighting the NWO” wrote 88AndOn in a YouTube comment the Daily Dot couldn’t ascertain was a troll, or for real.
Dubiel is not in any way the first video uploader to use misleading titles or descriptions to achieve viral fame or make a point; Sarah Churman became a viral video star after her video of hearing herself “for the first time” went viral. Churman was not actually born deaf as written in her video’s description, a fact she clarified in a subsequent interview to Good Morning America.