- Joined
- Jun 9, 2014
Antonio "SoFloAntonio" Lievano, 2015
SoFloAntonio is a "YouTube pranker", one of the many view-whoring assholes who helped make the phrase "it's just a prank bro" a meme. He's also a massive thief of other peoples' content, which he adds letterboxing and title cards to and then uploads onto his Facebook page without crediting the original creators. As of this post, the SoFlo page on Facebook has nearly 7 million likes.
He's been accused of content theft for quite some time, however these allegations only recently gained public traction when Ethan Klein of h3h3productions began creating expose videos of his own. It all began in November 2015 when Ethan created a reaction video to SoFloAntonio's Facebook page:
At the end of this video Ethan announces a parody page he's created called "SoFloBro" where Ethan took SoFloAntonio's videos and uploaded them in full with only slight modifications -- exactly what SoFloAntonio does on his own page. Over the next few months this page would eventually amass over 88K likes, "more than [the actual h3h3 page itself]" according to Ethan. It's this Facebook page that sparked drama with SoFlo.
At the beginning of this month, the SoFloBro page was deleted. According to Ethan there was no notification or any other sort of heads up that the page was being taken down. Even stranger, literally everyone who had liked the SoFloBro page had somehow automatically liked the actual SoFlo page. SoFloAntonio had the page deleted and took all the likes for himself.
Ethan also notes how Antonio is abusing a loophole in Facebook's new "credit" system where Antonio uploads his stolen content to a dummy page first, and then credits the dummy page instead of the original creators.
Following the creation of this video, SoFloBro was restored on Facebook as a "community page" for SoFlo. Antonio also created an "expose" response video of his own with groundless evidence accusing Ethan of content theft:
This, of course, being too good to pass up prompts Ethan to go full blast on Antonio. In his follow-up video, Ethan completely dismantles Antonio's business practices. He shares threatening legal emails he received, links the dummy Facebook page to Antonio's company, and proves Antonio as a content thief using the video Antonio literally just recorded.
SoFlo has not yet responded to Ethan's latest video, and judging by the contents of Ethan's emails it looks like the "legal team" at SoFlo have backed off.
That said, Antonio has been called out for theft plenty of times before. He made a parody video about the accusations in January:
He's also made a "coming out" video where he claims that he licenses all of the videos he shares, which isn't true as Ethan's video demonstrates.
This mess is still unfolding, but this is what's happened so far. I'll admit, I'm not familiar with social media in general, and I only casually follow Ethan Klein -- if I'm missing stuff, please feel free to share it here and I'll incorporate it into the OP.
