‘Avi out’: the uncomfortable relationship between Rebel News and Australia’s anti-vaccine protesters

Last week, near the marble-clad walls of Australia's largest library, a perplexing confrontation broke out between anti-vaccination protesters and the far right's news outlet of choice, Rebel News.

One of the Convoy to Canberra members stood over Avi Yemini, Rebel News's key figure in Australia, as a small crowd and police watched on.

"I'm not going to be intimidated by you, Rebel News, or anybody else," the protester said. "We don't want you going up to people."

Others chimed in to defend Yemini.

"He's on our side," one said.

Some began to chant "Avi out! Avi out!" before vision of the incident - which Rebel News says was selectively edited to delete a chant of "Avi stay!" - cuts out.

The scene was jarring, not least because Rebel News has positioned itself as an ally of the protesters, their lone voice in an industry otherwise uniformly hated.

It speaks to Rebel News's uncomfortable position within the convoluted ecosystem of such protests.

The crowds gathered in Canberra are populated by a disparate collection of sovereign citizens, wellness advocates, anti-vaccination groups, conspiracy theorists, doomsday preppers, United Australia party supporters, and other fringe political groups.

Some welcomed Yemini as a kind of cult hero. Others accused him of trying to monetise their movement.

Despite the mixed reception, one thing is abundantly clear.

The anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown protests, including last year's Melbourne rallies, have been a boon for Rebel News.

It has posted an avalanche of social media content about the convoy, amplifying it across an audience of hundreds of thousands across Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Telegram and Instagram.

In return, audiences have grown exponentially, taking its social media following beyond some of Australia's well-established traditional news mastheads, and increasing its ability to raise funds.

On Twitter - a less-used platform for most anti-vaccination groups - Rebel News Australia dominated the Canberra convoy discourse.

Analysis provided to the Guardian by the Queensland University of Technology Digital Media Research Centre shows two accounts - the international Rebel News account and Rebel News Australia - quickly became the two largest disseminators among the 32,218 tweets attached to the two main Canberra convoy hashtags.

"They are by far the biggest drivers, amplifiers of it," Dr Timothy Graham, the centre's chief investigator, told the Guardian.

"I think you can say that without a shadow of a doubt."

On Facebook, where Rebel News Australia is followed by 158,000 users, regular posts about the convoy have helped drive up interactions and grow its audience.

In the week to 5 February, Rebel News Australia's interactions spiked considerably to 95,000, almost double the week prior and triple the page's weekly average for the past year, driving a 4% growth in its following.

The trend is similar - though far more muted - to that witnessed during the September rallies in Melbourne, where Rebel News was ubiquitous.

The Melbourne rally fuelled record growth for the page, delivering it almost 44,000 new followers in a single week in September, a growth of more than 64%.

Without providing specific detail, Facebook has confirmed to The Guardian that it has removed some of Rebel News's Covid content for breaching its misinformation and harm policies.

But it's done little to dampen its rise.

Since creating its Facebook page in September 2020, Rebel News Australia has built a greater following on the platform than the Hobart Mercury, Newcastle Herald and the Canberra Times.

On Yemini's YouTube account, which had an established following prior to him joining Rebel News, the surge from the Melbourne protests was huge.

He grew his subscriber base by 54,000 in September and 73,000 in October, according to analytics tool Social Blade, taking it to a total of 697,000.

His monthly video views peaked at 17m in October, and have again surged to almost 15m in January, staggering increases from the 1.9m views he received in August.

Many of Rebel News posts link back to donation pages or fundraising campaigns to fund its operations. In Rebel News's report about GoFundMe cutting off donations to the Canadian convoy protesters, for example, Rebel News included an option for readers to donate to the outlet.

"They're in the middle and I think what's really happening ... is they're trying to leverage and exploit what's going on to build the brand, to get clout, and to try and get donations," Graham said. "And the crabs are scrambling up the pot."

Rebel's fundraising efforts continue despite the efforts of PayPal, which reportedly cut services for Rebel News, and YouTube, which has attempted to prevent Rebel News and Yemini from monetising its platform.

The way Rebel is fundraising from the protests has itself become a source of consternation among some of those gathered in Canberra.

In another video from the protest site, Yemini was filmed from afar by an anti-vaccination group streaming live to its followers.

"I haven't made a cent from our protests."

Rebel News says Yemini is on a fixed salary and has not profited from coverage of any individual topic.

In September, as anti-vaccination protests in his country grew, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau fielded a question from a representative of Rebel News.

Rebel News's inclusion at a leaders' debate had been a point of contention. The organisation was initially blocked from attending, but sued the government to force its way in.

When Rebel News questioned the prime minister about the episode, Trudeau did not hold back.

Rebel News's resources and influence is derived from its Canadian base. It was founded there in 2015, is led by controversial Canadian figure Ezra Levant, and traffic to its website remains overwhelmingly North American.

As it rose to prominence, Rebel News openly embraced figures from the far right.

Contributors included Tommy Robinson, the founder of the English Defence League, Katie Hopkins, and "Proud Boys" founder Gavin McInnes.

During the 2017 Charlottesville rallies, a then Rebel correspondent Faith Goldy spoke positively about white nationalists' views on race and on the "JQ", slang for the "Jewish question".

Goldy, who has denied being a white supremacist, was fired after appearing on a neo-Nazi Daily Stormer podcast, and Levant has insisted she was not reporting for Rebel News at Charlottesville and attended "in direct contradiction of my written instruction to her not to attend".

"The moment she confessed that she had secretly appeared on an anti-Semitic podcast, I fired her," he told the Guardian.

After surviving blow-back for the 2017 events, which prompted boycotts by advertisers and Canada's Conservative party, the pandemic provided an opportunity for Rebel News to shift its focus to anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown causes.

The Canada convoys, which inspired the Australian iteration, have shown the outlet's ability to harness the hate for traditional media among anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown protesters.

Late last month, Levant was greeted by a rapturous crowd when he addressed convoy protesters outside parliament in Ottawa.

"I want to tell you what excites me the most about this crowd," he said. "I see a lot of cameras. A lot of independent journalists. Because when people say 'what do we do about the media?', I say, 'you become the media'."

The number of Canadians accessing Rebel News main website has increased by 70% in the past month alone, according to Similarweb, a traffic analysis tool.

Australians now make up 13% of the traffic to the website, the third most of any country.

The Australian audience to the website has grown by 11% in a single month.

Elise Thomas, an open source intelligence analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, says anti-vaccination and anti-lockdown communities are well-suited for groups like Rebel News to "reinvigorate their following".

"The thing about these kind of fringe communities is that they are often really hyper-engaged communities, they're not getting this content anywhere else in their life," Thomas says.

Graham describes the protests as "sure-thing in terms of engagement" for groups like Rebel News.

"It's not content that actually has any coherent ideological driver," he says. "A lot of people are talking about it and it kind of speaks to a really strongly-held identity and partisan beliefs, it really affirms people's belief about themselves."

Levant contested the notion that Rebel News was profiteering from the protest coverage.

"You suggest that we are profiteering off of our protest coverage. But in fact, advertising represents only about 1% of our revenues, as we have been demonetized by YouTube and Facebook censors," he said. "Whether we have one view or one million, our YouTube advertising revenue is the same - zero."

The hiring of Yemini, who had already amassed a sizeable YouTube following of his own, has helped propel Rebel News to new audiences here.

As has Yemini's recent appearances on Fox News in the US, where he is framed as an objective commentator on Australia's Covid response.

Levant is clearly a fan. He told the Guardian he was "the best" in the company.

"I'm not sure what your basis is to suggest that our Australian expansion is due to Covid. I think it's pretty obvious that it's driven by the talent of Avi," he said.

He said Rebel News does not consider its audience "far right".

"Traditional partisan labels have lost much of their meaning in the past two years," he said.

Australian content - short, slickly-produced videos, often heavy on confrontation - mirrors the Canadian style, and the two arms also adopt similar strategies to muscle in on the space of news outlets.

When Yemini was rejected for a press pass for the Victorian parliament, for example, he sued the state government, much like Rebel's Canadian arm last year.

Yemini, who served in the Israeli military, came to Rebel News with his own chequered past.

He has been convicted of assaulting his ex-wife and once described himself as the "the world's proudest Jewish Nazi" - a comment he has since claimed was sarcasm.

The rise of Rebel News Australia on the back of anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown sentiment raises questions for the major social media companies, which have committed to limiting misinformation during the pandemic.

Facebook would not share the amount of strikes it had delivered to Rebel News's page.

But it confirmed it had removed some content for breaching misinformation and harm policies.

"People who repeatedly breach our misinformation policies will have restrictions placed on their page, if removals reach a certain threshold we will remove the page," a Meta spokesperson says.

YouTube says it has taken action directly against Yemini's channel and the main Rebel News account by preventing them from running ads or using other monetisation features like Super Chat.

"We have suspended both channels from the YouTube Partner Program. All channels on YouTube need to comply with our community guidelines and in order to monetise, channels must comply with the YouTube Partner Program policies, which includes our advertiser-friendly guidelines," a spokesperson says. "We periodically review and remove channels that are not in compliance with our policies, and channels that repeatedly violate these policies are suspended from our partner program."