Does a video actually show Karoline Leavitt and Whoopi Goldberg together on "The View," with Goldberg walking off the set? No, that's not true: A now-deleted TikTok video with a caption misspelling Leavitt's first name as "Caroline" was generated using AI. In reality, Leavitt hasn't appeared on "The View" since becoming White House press secretary (or before that).
A copy of the video appeared in a post on X (archived here) where it was published on February 24, 2025. It was described as:
Karoline @PressSecmade Whoopie so mad with her Truth bombs & facts that Whoopie walked off the View Set during taping
🤣😂🤣
This is what the post looked like:
Karoline @PressSec made Whoopie so mad with her Truth bombs & facts that Whoopie walked off the View Set during taping
-- TheRealCherokeeOwl (@RealCherokeeOwl) February 24, 2025
🤣😂🤣 pic.twitter.com/PYIzMu2syJ
The video itself had a caption on it that read "Whoopi Goldberg WALKS OFF The VIEW During Explosive Debate With Caroline Leavitt!"
This is the moment in the video Whoopi Goldberg supposedly got up and left:
(Image source: screenshot taken by Lead Stories on February 25, 2025 at 21:49:54 UTC)
The video featured a TikTok watermark that read @david.paul931 (archived here). No such video was present on that channel but a Google Search for than handle (archived here) did return a link with a thumbnail that looked exactly like the video, indicating it had been deleted or taken private. Analysis of the link with a tool to determine the upload date of a TikTok video URL determined the video had been uploaded on February 22, 2025.
Lead Stories ran the video through the AI detection tool at hivemoderation.com. The tool gave the video an aggregate score of 99.9, concluding it was "likely to contain AI-generated or deepfake content" but limiting that statement to the audio part.
(Source: screenshot of Hive moderation results obtained by Lead Stories on February 25, 2025 at 22:00:05 UTC)
However the video contained several artifacts that make it clear the video consisted of two halves that were spliced together using video editing software and some kind of AI tool. Sometimes Karoline's hand and Whoopi's shoulder were seen crossing the white line separating both halves of the video but in other cases they disappeared behind it. The hand also showed deformations typical of AI generated footage. Another AI "miracle" in the video was the sudden change in hair color of the woman sitting behind Goldberg:
(Image: collage of screenshots from the video put together by Lead Stories on February 25, 2025 at 22:03:01 UTC)
According to the cast & crew listing for "The View" on The Internet Movie Database (archived here) Karoline Leavitt has never appeared on "The View, as of the time of writing.
Lead Stories recently did another fact check about Leavitt and Goldberg on The View.
