YEGWAVE profits from racial hatred
I've been long following Yegwave on Instagram as a curiosity since I live in the city that it reports on. Yegwave gives the impression that they are a page dedicated to being on-top of the most recent happenings in Edmonton. While that does occasionally feel true with their live updates about traffic jams, weather reports and other live events, they have a sinister side that has been becoming more and more obvious lately.
An article in The Griff earlier this year talks about how Yegwave habitually steals journalists articles without attribution. This is obviously a bad thing, and the consistency of this happening indicates the laziness and blatant plagiarism that goes on at Yegwave.
They manage to get around the news ban on Instagram by advertising themselves as an "entertainment" page, and their horrible attempts at journalism (when it isn't plagiarized) could scantly be called "news". Most of their posts are sensationalist headlines to capture the attention of some scrolling reader. They are quite literally just headlines with a caption occasionally expanding (usually stolen material) and then prompting readers to chip in their opinion.
Lately, the comment sections on their posts have been festering with more explicitly racial hatred than one would typically expect.
Recently, there have been a surprising volume of people standing outside in costumes with signs like "Stop Mass Immigration!" and "Too Many Migrants!". Yegwave's caption, cowardly, does not take a stance on the image, simply asking "Thoughts⁉️", then allowing the comments to run rampant, basically unmoderated saying some of the most disgusting shit I've seen on social media in a while.
Other posts concerning immigration / permanent residence garner responses similar and worse. In a post about international students struggling with permanent residency (where the caption and content of the post was stolen from The Globe and Mail, again with no attribution (seriously, if you want to know the extent of Yegwave's plagiarism, just google their captions and you will find the original articles basically word for word)), the comments run wild with variations on "we are glad immigrants are going back to where they are from". Many comments that severely misunderstand the content of the article, as well as immigration policy, get boosted to the top for their sensationalism. Some comments claiming this is "the best news ever", others outwardly claiming many of them have fake documents, and others just saying "good".
This is one article about immigration on Yegwave. They post these kinds of stories regularly. It's not surprising to see 4-5 of these a week. The same kind of comments regularly appear on every such kind of post. Even if the story isn't explictly about immigration, if some such post includes something about India, Amarjeet Sohi or anyone who does not appear white, you can bet that the comments are a nightmare racist mess.
The recent wave of pro-Palestine & pro-Lebanon demonstrations in the city, especially those in downtown that draw large crowds that disrupt traffic, garner the eye of bigotry from Yegwave's community. One such post of a recent demonstration allow the comments to become a total battleground, many of the top ones asking to protesters to be "shipped out" or "deported" to Palestine or Lebanon to "protest there". Hundreds of comments in support of the state of Israel and their genocide of Palestine and Lebanon.
Yegwave simply just allows hate speech to flourish on their page as a way to get more engagement.
Yegwave, being a page with 430K followers as of writing, do not care about this. In fact, the more comments on a post, the more money they can make off the engagement and followers and ads and all else that follows in the wake of a viral post. Whether or not the anonymous owner(s) of Yegwave are racist or not, they clearly allow for racism on their posts to spread and they continue to post outrage material that garners clicks and engagement and virality.
They are after the money in the game. Whether or not people get hurt is purely secondary.
They do not remove racist comments, in fact, frequently they let them rise to the top of their posts.
They do not denounce racism in their posts, in fact, leaving bigoted comments up for all to see creates a safe space where racists are allowed to freely express themselves without fear of repercussion.
While this examination has been mostly about Yegwave's racism issue, this goes basically the same for homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, yadda yadda yadda... you know how it is. Yegwave has become the Instagram equivalent of a far-right Facebook page with the amount of hatred they allow, they just haven't adopted the symbols yet.
It is important to remember that Yegwave is NOT a news page. They steal news from journalists and pass it off as their own. They frequently post outrage content to get clicks, they allow for paid promotions on their page and they profit off of allllllll this.
They would not still be around if there wasn't some kind of good money in hatred.
-bzg