Nuseir Yassin has perhaps one of the most recognizable faces on Facebook. Over the last few years, his videos have taken social media by storm, racking up millions and millions of views.
Also known as Nas, or Nas Daily, his video clips, which are generally one minute long, touch upon a wide array of topics, including travel, food, arts, the environment and racism. His personable style, flashy video effects and youthful energy have enabled Nas to create a massively receptive audience online, with his posts generating huge amounts of likes, shares and comments.
But in an uncharacteristic video released on Wednesday, Nas took on Al Jazeera, exposing a campaign to smear him by the news network, which is effectively an extension of the Qatari government.
His wrongdoing? Being an Arab who openly promotes peaceful co-existence, including between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians.
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In the video (see below), Nas shows clips of the Qatari channel spreading the lie that he is “using words such as… openness, coexistence, peace” in a bid to “make Israel look good.” If that wasn’t enough, Al Jazeera then claims that Nas is “using all the tools that the Israeli government provides him, and he is part of their official propaganda program.”
In his response, Nas shows how the false message was amplified by a network of shady Arabic-language “news” outlets that effectively operate as Al Jazeera subsidiaries.
Typically, Nas explained, a normal video on one of these channels would receive somewhere in the region of 30,000 views. But the video post targeting him was sponsored, thus skyrocketing the view count to some 2,000,0000 hits. With the video promoted on various such news outlets, it is likely that tens of millions have been exposed to the Qatari smear.
“So Al Jazeera or its affiliates in another country put government money to spread fake news against an individual,” Nas explains, while proof is shown on-screen of a sponsored video.
The evidence points to a comprehensive strategy in which money is being spent by a government apparently intent not only on discrediting one of social media’s more powerful voices of reason, but also manipulating divergent audiences.
As Nas explains, the technique was conceived and implemented years ago; namely, that Al Jazeera duplicitously disseminates often totally contrasting messages to its English-speaking and Arabic-speaking viewers. As Nas highlights in his video, “To the English world they say, ‘Let’s remember the Holocaust and never repeat it.’ To the Arab world they say, ‘Did the Holocaust really happen?”
https://www.facebook.com/nasdaily/videos/3535110433193633/
