Facebook
BannedA few months prior to this fiasco, Comedy Central’s Jim Jefferies interviewed Avi Yemini. Avi recorded the whole interview via hidden camera, resulting in about an hour of footage.
Fast forward several months to right after the Christchurch shooting. All of a sudden, Comedy Central decides to edit and release the interview, implying that the interview took place after the shooting.
What’s worse: the one hour interview was edited down to a few minutes, and Avi’s answers were mixed and matched to different questions, deceptively painting him as an anit-Muslim extremist.
In order to defend himself against this defamation, Avi released the hidden camera footage online, including on his Facebook page. Shortly afterwards, Facebook banned his page (which had about 50k followers) for violating their community guidelines, specifically for “hate speech.”
Let me get this straight:
- @jimjefferies and @ComedyCentral create a defamatory video about me & post it on Facebook.
- I respond by uploading secret footage that proves it was #FakeNews.
- My video is deleted & my page BANNED.
- Their defamatory video stays.
Seems legit.
– Avi Yemini (@OzraeliAvi) 25 Mar 2019
Avi also released a YouTube video detailing the ban from Facebook. From the video:
Do not pretend for a second that you have any other reason to ban me other than the fact that I’m attacking Comedy Central and Jim Jefferies, by defending myself, from defamation, from the fact that you tried to tie me to a radical white supremacist terrorist.
He continues to highlight the horrifying reality:
It is so funny to me that hate speech has become now defending yourself from defamation from the main stream media.
Needless to say this stirred up a bit of a controversy, even causing prominent figures such as Dave Rubin (tweet) and Piers Morgan (tweet) to chime in.
Facebook, Comedy Central, and Jim Jefferies have amazingly all remained completely silent on this.