“I LEARNED LONG AGO NEVER TO WRESTLE WITH A PIG. YOU GET DIRTY, AND BESIDES, THE PIG LIKES IT.”
The internet is a beautiful thing.
It’s a human intelligence/stupidity filter & at the same time a severely underestimated arrogance amplifier.
- trigger warning: my observations below come from someone that has had the privilege of living in 4 different Asian countries in the past 30 years, having visited more than 15 in the region & having lived in Europe in my 20s (so take what I write below with a grain of salty salt salt) and… even though apparently “because I’m white” I’m not supposed to ever suffer it — has experienced all types of racism & xenophobia over the most minute & banal day to day things.
In trying to write my contribution to this week’s Bloomr.SG Medium post, I inadvertently found myself looking into a lot of the local online conversations in regards to racism, Singapore’s standing in terms of foreign talent & the future outlook of said talent for their contributions to the country.
Having a client pitch (for our Bloomr.SG Social product) coming up where said data might be the clincher for the deal = also made me try to not take a lot of the comments to heart but, rather, find a consensus and recognize a pattern (if existent) amongst the topics surfaced while trying to figure out if there was any “connective tissue to the Singaporean Story of racist online behavior”.
If you’ve been around the internet for long enough, what I did was basically… Diogo went down the rabbit hole = if you catch my drift.
Yeah… I made the MISTAKE of looking for and “listening” to, conversations on EDMW, the SG /sub, YT & IG comments on recent racially biased/triggering posts & a lot of data picked up by our MC social listening tools (picking up hundreds of public data points on the subject).
Won’t talk about the data found & the deep convos conversed (or dispersed) around said situations or topics (as a lot of it doesn’t deserve the light of day)— or even the perspectives on racism that exist in this country (as tbh, even though they’re terrible, dig hard and deep enough in any country and you’ll find the same type of “pigs rolling around in the filth”, so… seek and you shall find I guess) but there was something that popped up back at me over and over again.
For a country’s peoples that constantly state online (be it a vocal minority or not) that the content that is produced by Mediacorp (and by extension content teams like Bloomr.SG) & other media companies is or are constantly being “censored” and, that they (as in, said peoples) can’t “really be honest or upfront about their views online for fear of repercussions” of POFMA or other gov policies/entities (“being POFMAd” for eg has become a snarky response to edgelord humor in such forums/posts), you really do see & read a lot of things that if they really were being censored — would never be posted let alone ever be stated in public (and readily available). As it stands, racist behavior is out in the open and hence, easily identifiable.
One would argue that racism isinherent to any people and hence it’d be easy to find them online (as I did above, clearly it is easy to always dig that deep and always find examples of it, regardless of the country it is stated in or from what people it comes from), but the reality is that said views currently tend to not violate (or they circumvent) the terms and conditions of online platforms (the non identification of local slang for eg across social — especially in these types of topics, is a severe blind spot imo, not to mention when there’s slang, different languages & dialects thrown into it).
Some of these conversations are terrible to the point where you can find really long threads where folks, without any qualms (no real biased data there in terms of gender, age, education background, etc, as smart “egg accounts” tend to lie about everything that can identify them online), are blatantly and arrogantly racist towards each other, being extremely demeaning to women, men, different raced individuals, educated, non-educated, and many many more disgusting things that happen on a daily basis.
Basically, your “welcome to the internet” meme, Singapore style.
If you haven’t had the pleasure of seeing/hearing what I mean by said meme, have fun with this (another warning if you’re not used to the internet or the type of conversations/comments/topics/content I’m talking about).
Recent cases of outwardly posited racism (recorded or not) not-withstanding then, are and have been easily found for years online, so the recurrent “resurgence” of the topic because of obvious examples as now “being important” or worse even — trendy… is mind boggling to me.
Not because they exist but, because they’re proof positive that if there is censorship online in Singapore (which… once again, one can state that if it exists, it can be seen as similar if not equal to a lot of other countries, just interpreted differently… this is of course debatable and I understand the nuances attached to said sweeping statements, so I’ll restrict them to this specific online topic at hand), said censorship or censors are doing a terrible job in regards to racism.
Mind you, if I can close on a more “positive” note, this is not me talking about the subject to increase or highlight considerations of adding or creating censorship or even of suppression or controlling of freedom of speech but rather, I’m positing that everything online & then what surfaces to the IRL realm of Singaporean life, can always (and is always) subject to not just interpretation but, perspective & the freedom to really not look for such terrible things, if one has the privilege to not do so.
As in… you only don’t see what is happening culturally and socially in terms of racist happenings in this little red dot, if you’re not rolling in the dirt with all the other pigs.
Unfortunately for those like me (and other local social media teams in the country), that see it every day/week/month/year in our reports or social listening data insights, even though I know we’ve kinda become numb to it (terrible I know, but real nonetheless) all I can say is — read the data, correlate facts, do your reports, don’t take anything to heart and most of all, don’t wrestle with the pigs (trolls/racists) because you’ll lose your bearings in their dirt pen!
Writer’s final side note: I’m not calling internet trolls = pigs. It’s a metaphor. If you think calling a troll a pig is an insult and not the troll part of that characterization, then you clearly haven’t read enough Norse mythology (on what a troll really is).
