Earlier this week, harrowing nanny-cam footage of a 2-year-old rescuing a twin brother who’d gotten pinned underneath a fallen dresser went viral, garnering millions of views on YouTube and Facebook.
But now some skeptics are wondering whether the video was a hoax, a notion the boys’ father dismissed in an interview with CNN.
Still, The New York Post lays out the following reasons for why some folks think the video is suspect:
1. An empty dresser: There are no clothes or items in any of the dresser’s eight drawers.
2. The nanny-cam’s direction: The camera is trained on the dresser instead of the boy’s bed.
3. No parental watch: Some thought it was suspicious that neither of the parents heard the dresser fall or the kids yelling.
4. The father’s connection: Ricky Shoff works for Vivint Smart Home, the company that sells the nanny-cam that captured the incident.
If it all adds up (1 and 4 are particularly suspicious to me), this wouldn’t be the first time parents have faked a video about their kids to go viral.
YouTube star, Roman Atwood, routinely puts his kids in “danger” for clicks. There was the Balloon Boy supposedly flying across America that had everyone riveted to livestreams. And then there was the video of kids spreading flour ALL OVER THE HOUSE that went nuts only to be quickly debunked.
That said, it takes a special kind of asshole parent to put their kids in this kind of legitimate danger to simply sell more video monitors. I’ll reserve becoming a complete conspiracy theory truther – for now. Instead I’ll just say, the circumstantial evidence is there, and I really hope it doesn’t add up.