It seems even the sight of a dead pig stuffed with seafood is abominable to some people.
Food vlogger Sonny Side, creator of the social media channel Best Ever Food Review Show, yesterday accused “anti-meat people” for mass reporting his episode about Filipino lechon — that’s roasted suckling pig for the sadly uninitiated — to the Facebook police.
He said that led to the social media platform censoring his video, which (obviously) had a negative impact on its views and shares.
The episode in question showed Side visiting Digos, a municipality in Davao del Sur, where he interviewed locals preparing seafood-stuffed lechon. The episode was posted on Aug. 16 and has received more than 1.8 million views as of writing.
It also appeared on his YouTube channel, where it has received more than a million views.
In his rant yesterday, Side said the video was reported for “Violent or Graphic Content.”
He wrote: “Before this moment, I was fine with civil discourse (and even uncivil discourse) in the comments section, ranging from how terrible my pronunciation is to whether people and cultures are ethical in their meat-eating traditions. Sadly, this changes today.”
“‘Anti-meat people,’ or whatever you want to call them, have reported my Stuffed Lechon video, resulting in it getting censored, halting its momentum, killing its views and shares and essentially effecting (sic) my bottom line,” he said.
The incident has led the content creator to ban “anti-meat” comments from his Facebook page “for eternity.”
Side told “anti-meat” people to just “click away or block” his channel if they don’t like its content.
He ended his post with this paragraph: “These cultures and their customs do not exist to contradict your worldview. They’ve been around since the beginning of time and they (outside of being inhumane or hunting animals to extinction) deserve your respect or at minimum your tolerance.”
Damn. That’s a lot of drama for lechon.
Many of his followers on Facebook were supportive of Side’s take on the issue. Wrote Daniel Reyes: “Well [I] am personally a vegetarian. I’ve watched many of your videos and honestly I’ve found zero of them offensive. When I saw this episode, the stuffed lechon, I also didn’t find it offensive. Food is the number one correlation to our culture.”
One Andres Chavez railed against Facebook’s content reviewers. He wrote: “That’s the problem with them ‘Facebook Reviewers.’ Do they really do thorough reviews or [do] they just base their sanctions on the number of ‘reports?'”
Ramon Fernandez III, however, thinks there’s an upside to the drama. “Censoring it makes the video more ‘clickbait-able’ [because] people love everything censored. Hahahaha,” he wrote.
So, was it right for Facebook to censor the video? Let us know by tweeting to @CoconutsManila.
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