Kay Yarma Puts the South African Social Media Awards On Blast for Exploitation

Kay Yarma Puts the South African Social Media Awards On Blast for Exploitation. The South African Social Media Awards recently dropped this year’s highly anticipated nominations list. These awards caters for brands, influencers and agencies using digital tools for content creation.

Clearly when the SASMAs announced these year’s nominees, they were expecting positive feedback. Sadly this has not been the case, but rather backlash after another. This time around the awards were supposed to be trending, with the nominated personalities busy campaigning for votes. Their fans could be making all the necessary noise, hyping them. Contrary to that, there are a number of people not happy with how things are done.

Jut recently Lasizwe, one of the nominees, asked his fans to not vote for him. He is battling it out with international stars in the African Social Media Star of the Year category. The category boasts the likes of Tyla, Black Coffee, Zee Nxumalo, Rango-tenge-tenge and Khaby Lame among other superstars. Furthermore, Lasizwe is also a nominee in the Most Popular Content Across Platforms and Social Media Personality of the Year categories.

Lasizwe, however is not interested in any of the awards. He is against people spending their hard earned cash for votes. Being nominated, is already a win for him, as it shows that he is recognized among the best in the industry. Echoing his views is multi-award winning brand influencer, Kay Yarms. She bashed SASMA for trying to get money from people, and using ifluencers’ fame to grow their platform.

Kay Yarms states that the biggest red flag for her was when they asked her to send a script to do a video encouraging her audience to vote for her. She also called them out when they nominated Nara Smith as a Food Influencer, over the many local content creators in that field.