By Angelina Hu
On Sunday, February 6th, 19-year-old Chinese figure skater Zhu Yi fell twice during the women’s short program team competition. Instead of reassuring the young girl’s first Olympic skate, the Chinese social media immediately descended upon her like vultures, and the hashtag “ZhuYiHasFallen” trended within a few hours on Weibo, China’s biggest platform. It was censored after it reached over 200 million views, as the comments users were making were growing increasingly harsh. On Monday, after she fell another two times on the free skate, hashtags such as “Zhu Yi Messed Up” and “Zhu Yi’s Debut Is Not Perfect” trended immediately, along with a second barrage of hate before being censored once again.
The comments ranged from critical and disapproving to outright false claims. Users called her “shameless,” “rotten,” and an “embarrassment.” Others claimed that the only reason she was picked to represent China was because her father is a prominent computer scientist at Beijing University. At the heart of this, however, is the extremely nationalistic attitude of the citizens. For years now, Chinese athletes have been under increasingly high pressure to perform flawlessly and bring home medals, more so than any other country in the world. As such, when one of their athletes stumbles, social media does not uplift them, but rather denounces them as having essentially “failed the mission.”
Zhu Yi was American-born and changed her citizenship to Chinese in order to represent them in the Olympics. Prior to the games, she was already being criticized on social media because she apparently could not fluently speak Mandarin– which should kind of be expected, since she
grew up in the U.S.. The harsh comments on Sunday allegedly impacted her performance on her free skate as well, as she stated, “I wanted to prove myself because I didn’t do so well yesterday, and what everyone said on the internet really affected me.”
On the contrary, the Chinese response to Gu Ailing (Eileen Gu) has been overwhelmingly positive. As another American-born athlete who changed her citizenship to Chinese to represent China, Gu has been widely applauded for her fluent Mandarin and interest in Chinese culture, as well as for giving China a spot at all in the skiing competition, as they have no big Chinese-born qualifiers for the sport. She brought home the gold medal for the freestyle big air skiing competition on Monday as well, which has amplified the praise.
What does this story tell us? Well, it tells us a lot about how nationalism obviously affects opinions, but it also greatly exemplifies how harsh social media can be. This is not exclusive to just China, either; while there have been no major incidents similar to the one involving Zhu Yi on platforms such as Twitter as of late, widespread dogpiling, hate-messaging, and general extremity of opinion is everywhere. Constantly.
When people engage in media, especially entertainment, it has become the norm to take an extreme stance. You must either be obsessed with it or despise it, or else your voice will not be heard. Moderate opinions are generally less amplified, as people with no big opinions tend not to voice them because they simply don’t have anything novel to say. This is the problem with the modern age of media and online commentary– when the media’s opinions are so polarized, the extremely negative opinions tend to take center stage. People out to criticize and degrade are often more vocal and fall into Ad Hominem fallacies, where they start attacking the person instead of their opinion. Death threats are jarringly common on Twitter, for example, as well as comments with racist undertones.
Why does this happen? Why does being on the internet produce such a hostile environment? It’s because of anonymity. When you put on the mask of a profile picture and username that does not directly reflect back to you in real life, there’s a sort of carelessness that comes with it. Morally, yes, you will feel bad for your actions, but most people unfortunately detach themselves when it comes to being online. You don’t know the person behind the screen whom you’re currently mocking and bickering with. You can’t see their face or hear their voice; you’re fighting with words on a screen. It might as well be a robot on the other side! Many people would very likely not act so harshly if they were talking to the other person in real life, and many people especially would not get so riled up to the point of death threats.
There is something dehumanizing about social media– both to its users and the people it critiques. There is no recognition of the people in the pictures being human and capable of mistakes; there is no forgiveness for mistakes or misdemeanors, only waves of critiques and name-calling. This is an unfortunate fact of modern social media all over the world, and it has been reflected in this latest case with Zhu Yi and the Olympics.
