Photo: mStar
Malaysian Twitter is almost as good as the telenovelas that air on local television. Drama and stories are aplenty, with bullying and harassment being part of it.
Recently, a local TV station invited two young men to be guests on their live show to talk about cyberbullying. There two guests were Azfar Firdaus, who suffers from Albinism, and Shazwan Zafran, both of whom are rather prominent on the local social media scene, making them rather prime targets (or practitioner, in this case) of online bullying.
Photo: Twitter (@ibnuzafran)
When asked (on live television, mind you!) how he managed being cyberbullied and body shamed, Azfar (@Azfarovski on Twitter), recounted a firsthand experience of being bullied. Ironically, the bully turned out to be the other guest on the show. Azfar recalled an incident about albinos in Tanzania being killed and cut up for rituals. Shazwan then posted about it, tagging Azfar with the caption “please hunt and cut up Azfar too”. Insensitive and inhumane hardly begins to cover it - we can only imagine how horrifying it must be to have jokes made about an incident like that, much less to wish harm of that manner on to you.
Azfar calmly called Shazwan out on his “joke”, and said that cyberbullies often feel invincible when they are hiding behind a screen, not knowing that they might just end up actually meeting their victims. “Macam nilah,” Azfar cheekily added, gesturing at the embarassed Shazwan.
Netizens went crazy, with many, many viewpoints being shared all across the blue bird’s platform. While a fair amount of people stood up for Azfar’s actions and pointed out how important it is to spread the message against bullying, there were also some who said that doing so on live television was, in itself, a form of bullying too. Two wrongs don’t make a right, after all. One thing is for certain, though - apologies should have been made.
Unfortunately, Shazwan never took the effort to fix things. He simply stuttered (anyone would have been in shock, after all), and took to Twitter to say how unprofessional Azfar was. That was definitely not the best solution, as local Twitter folks took the opportunity to tell him off.
Azfar, in the meantime, also took to Twitter to explain his side of things. He stated that all he did was simply to show people the repercussions of a bully’s behaviour online and offline, and how past actions can come back to haunt someone. He shared his frustration and how it wasn’t just because Shazwan making fun of his physical looks, but more so because he was inviting people to harm him while making light of a situation in which an albino boy died - turning it into a personal attack.
When netizens (you are all very quick ah!) pointed out something Azfar tweeted in 2016, the victim in question pointed out that he had since apologised and learned from his mistakes. That is how people should grow, we believe.
Make mistakes, apologise, and learn from them.
By: Celestine Foo
