Navigating sensitive issues on the social media landmine

Aug 16, 2024

By Emmanuel Joseph
If the first week of the Olympics saw heated discussions about the opening ceremony - where Christians were upset over the mockery of the Last Supper, the second week saw equally angry mobs take on a far more technical, sensitive, even universal issue of gender and sports, in this case, women’s boxing.

Algeria’s representative to the sport, Imane Khelif, was accused by the coach of her Italian counterpart, Angelina Carini, among other things, of being “male”. Carini withdrew from her match, citing safety concerns, impliedly agreeing with her coach.

This led to a chorus of opinion decrying the injustice, unfairness and inequality in having a man beat up a woman in a sport category reserved for the latter. The Prime Minister of Italy, billionaire Elon Musk, US Presidential candidate Donald Trump and British author J.K Rowling all weighed in on the issue, siding with the Italian boxer and denouncing the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for allowing the ‘travesty’.

Days later, many facts came to light – Khelif was, according to the IOC, for all intents and purposes, indeed female, “born female, was registered female, lived her life as a female, boxed as a female, has a female passport.” She had grown up poor, and her sports records show she has been beaten not once, but nine times in recent years. Her past opponents came to her defence, even her accuser has attempted to apologise to her. The details of the testing that started the controversy in 2023 was sketchy and no one really had any idea why it sparked off a chromosome controversy to begin with.

This clearly isn’t the same case as American transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, whose career skyrocketed after her transition as a male, ranking 554th in the 200m freestyles, 65th in the 500m freestyle and 32nd in the 1650m freestyle events, which moved up to fifth, first and eighth in those respective events as a female.

Though the highly publicised case of Lia has near-irrefutable indications, two other female-to male transgenders did improve their performances, without the hormone therapy advantages to hold top 15 per cent finishes within US university swimming meets - Iszac Henig and Schuyler Bailar.

Religious perspective notwithstanding, there remains many more studies needed on the secular perspective of these sports as it is a complicated topic involving many fields of expertise - sports science, gender studies, social anthropology, genetics, cellular biology and many related fields before a truly scientific answer can be reached on what is a ‘woman’ or ‘man’ in competitive sports. This doesn’t only encompass the ‘transgender’ part but cases of intersex, genetic sexual differentiation disorders and so on.

What’s obvious at this point, is, at least, Khelif was born and lived a woman, and apart from one disputed test, no one questioned this.

She went on to secure herself a minimum of a bronze medal in her event, with a chance of even clinching a gold.

Meanwhile, those who raised this issue, have all but helped lower the temperature they created.

The relative anonymity of social media, coupled with the free flow of information, some fact, a whole lot of others, opinions, have emboldened to present their personal thoughts, whether backed by scientific, religious or social proof, as the gospel truth. The affinity we have to listen to thoughts that mirror our own, has created echo chambers of ideas that reinforce our own perception of what we believe is an ideal world.

This isolationism convinces us we are perpetually right, and inversely, that others are wrong, and so turns social media from a potential tool for discourse and dialogue, to a weaponised form of preaching, to yell our opinions to drown out the thoughts and ideas of other people.

To compound the problem, we forget that social media is a business at the end of the day — people spend an average of six hours and 40 minutes a day on their phones — two hours and 23 minutes of that is on consuming news, ideas and ‘facts’ on social media. The owners of these apps want to keep us glued on as long as they can — meaning their interests would not be that we consume safely, but that we continue consuming, so “we” as “products” have more billable ad revenue. Facebook alone is said to have made USD600 million (RM2,688.90 million) off Malaysian users in 2023.

Social media companies have their own ideologies and agenda, as neutral as they try, or claim to try, to be.

Biz Stone, the former owner of Twitter (now X) was known to fact-check tweets during the Trump-Clinton election campaign.

Facebook and Meta platforms are known to censor some content sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.

This probably led our Prime Minister and Communications Ministry to mull setting up a “Malaysian” social media, after the censorship of Meta over a condolence message for the late Ismail Haniyeh, the assassinated leader of Hamas.

But will making demands by segmenting social media to serve our specific ideologies to be able to say what we think needs to be said, as citizens of a country, members of a community or adherents of a religion, without being able to reach across the aisle and increase our understanding about each other, in this shared space called Earth bring about the desired outcome?

Otherwise, we will be preaching to the converted, and instead of learning about and respecting each other more, social media to us, will just serve to build walls instead of bridges.

(Emmanuel Joseph oversees IT as his 9-5 job and from 5-9, he serves a few NGOs, think tanks and volunteer groups. He serves as an advisor for Projek Dialog and is a Fellow with the Institute of Research and Development of Policy)