By Alex Rivera | Cyber Culture Staff Writer
Historically, a viral video needed only to be entertaining. Today, a video must also survive the —a crowdsourced process of debunking, metadata scouring, and reverse image searching. The fact that the Cherokee video passed that gauntlet elevates it from “funny clip” to primary source evidence .
The video, captured on a doorbell camera, shows a middle-aged man (later identified only as “Gary”) walking onto the homeowner’s porch. For thirty seconds, nothing happens. Then, Gary produces a set of plastic maracas and begins performing an impromptu, off-key rendition of “Toxic” by Britney Spears. When the homeowner asks him to leave via the two-way audio, Gary responds by pressing his face directly against the camera lens and whispering, “You can’t verify what you can’t prove.”
The homeowner told a local news affiliate: “I didn’t set out to make a meme. I just wanted people to stop saying I faked the maracas.”
