In July 2023, a purported celebrity news YouTube channel known as Just In (@JustInCeleb) published a new video that claimed film actor and director Mel Gibson had exposed entertainment icon Oprah Winfrey regarding “Sound of Freedom,” a film centered on child-sex trafficking. The title read, “Mel Gibson Exposes Oprah’s QUESTIONABLE Action For Hollywood Elite.”

However, no part of the video, including its AI-generated narrator voice, ever presented evidence that Gibson had exposed Winfrey for anything. It was nothing more than misleading clickbait that was apparently meant to rake in YouTube advertising revenue based on obtaining video views from users who might be prone to placing blind trust in content as long as it agrees with their preexisting, evidence-free viewpoints.

In this story, we’ve detailed multiple key points about the video, including its massive view count and the primary claims that were being made about Gibson and Winfrey.

The Misleading Video’s Virality

By early August, the original video link on the Just In YouTube channel had either been deleted or switched to private. We previously reached out to the channel to ask about its content, but did not receive a response.

Before the original video became unavailable, multiple YouTube users reposted the full clip in their own reaction videos. In seemingly all of these reaction videos, the users who were reacting repeatedly made shocked and disgusted facial expressions and indicated with words to their viewers that, after watching the clip, they had concerns about Winfrey. Most of the people who posted reaction videos did not appear to spend even a few seconds to search the internet for information that would reveal the inaccuracies that the original video had misleadingly presented as facts.

One reaction video that was posted by a prominent YouTube user was viewed nearly 3 million times. Other reaction videos had view counts that stretched as high as the tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands.

When combining the likely view count of the original video with the views of all of the reaction videos (and TikTok reposts), it’s entirely possible that the total view count for the clip extended into the tens of millions.