Despite calls for a boycott and many challenges along the way, the Nas Daily summit was held in Tel Aviv on Sunday, with over 1,000 influencers, content creators, advocacy activists, and avid Nas fans aged 15-78 making their way from places as far apart as Australia, San Francisco, and even Greenland.
This periodic summit held in Vietnam, Singapore, Dubai, Mongolia, Indonesia, and elsewhere, is led by one of social media’s most known influencers, Nuseir Yassin, who grew up in the Arab-Israeli town of Arrabe in the north, and now heads a global empire encompassing professional networks, social initiatives, content creating workshops, and studios dubbed the Nas Company.
The summit, focusing on content creation, business managing, brand building, and even matters of mental health for social media influencers, comprised several sessions of panel discussions, interviews, lectures, networking opportunities, and, most strikingly, “speed dating” sessions in which 1,000 people are instructed to walk around the room, find a person they don’t know, and discuss a chosen topic for five minutes.
The keynote speaker in the Tel Aviv conference was filmmaker and popular YouTuber Casey Neistat, who openly shared the challenges and hate speech he faced when he spoke up against the rampant antisemitism in the US following the October 7 massacre, as well as the calls to boycott and block him over his decision to attend the event in Tel Aviv.
Other participants included Qupanok Olsen, viral Greenlandic blogger and owner of the channel “Q’s Greenland;” Israeli journalist Guy Lerer, Israeli singer and songwriter Aviv Geffen, and of course Nas himself.
Ominous signs characterized the lead-up to the Tel Aviv summit, which were discussed openly with the audience as if it were a family matter.
Already in his opening remarks, Yassin unfolded the difficulties of bringing the event to Israel in wartime and during unprecedented anti-Israel and antisemitic campaigns online. At times he even thought of canceling the summit altogether. “We were signing the contract with the venue, quite literally, as Iranian missiles were making their way to Israel,” he noted frankly.
However, Yassin stressed, that the spirit of the event, which was all about “making new friends and alleviating the loneliness of content creator” ended up pushing him and his team into insisting on making the event come true.
Losing sponsorship over Israel
Yassin retold honestly how some brands decided to drop their sponsorship of the events in Israel and elsewhere over the issue of the war in Israel; also revealing that this was one of the reasons for their decision to have the audience play a major role in funding the event, with surpluses from tickets being allocated to non-profit organizations promoting coexistence in the Middle East.
One panel discussion even revolved around the question of whether companies should strive to hide their Israeli affiliation or not, with Yassin himself sharing the difficulties of suffering financial losses for doing the work he does while withholding the values of coexistence and tolerance.
Despite all these hardships, participants enjoyed a professional networking experience with a family-like ambiance and many intriguing sessions, all led by some of the most prominent content creators from Israel and abroad.
A more in-depth recounting of the Tel Aviv summit will follow in the coming days.