The Project hosts Waleed Aly and Rachel Corbett debate Chrissy Teigen’s apology
Waleed #Waleed
The Project hosts Waleed Aly and Rachel Corbett got themselves into a heated argument while discussing Chrissy Teigen’s apology for her past cyber-bullying.
While Rachel puts full blame on Chrissy and her actions, Waleed insisted that the Twitter culture encouraged her to make those awful comments.
“I don’t believe in cancel culture. I don’t think we should cancel people for their bad behaviour because it doesn’t give any encouragement to learn, grow, change, whatever. But I can fundamentally say as a person, you make mistakes in the past but making death threats. That’s something above and beyond. Can you really change from the person who used to do that at one point?”
Rachel responded “That’s not just telling somebody something mean or rude. That’s worse than bullying. You know, so I don’t know. Do you change that much as a person?”
Waleed added: “The line between death threats and bullying is shrinking and becoming fuzzier as a result of social media.”
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“But that doesn’t absolve of her of personal responsibility. You can’t say it’s a fault of the platform,” said Rachel.
Waleed disagreed. “I can say that, and it’s not the same as absolving her from responsibility. But it absolutely is a result of the platform.”
“You cannot say it’s not your responsibility, how you behave and interact on that platform. That platform does not draw you in to behaviour that you have no responsibility for,” said a frustrated Rachel.
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“It’s not that you can say it’s not your responsibility but the platform absolutely does drag people into that and we see that time and time and time again. I don’t know why we don’t just be honest about that. The problem is the machine. You’ve got to blow up this machine,” said Waleed.
“No. You cannot take that responsibility away from people,” said Rachel.
“No, I’m not. Sorry, that’s the third time I have said it,” an angry Waleed added. “I’m not taking the responsibility away. But the two things are not mutually exclusive. Some platforms drive us into worse behaviours than other platforms and that’s a fact.”
“That drives me nuts,” added Rachel. “Why am I trying to be a good person if I can just say, ‘Oh, well, the platform made me do it’.”
“I’m not saying the platform made me do it but I’m saying the platform creates that environment and encourages it,” said Waleed. “I would love to know how many people are piling on to Chrissy Teigen and making death threats and I’d be surprised if the answer is zero.”
Chrissy Teigen, 35, returned to Instagram recently with a lengthy message to apologise for her past cyber-bullying of Courtney Stodden, among others.
The post is also available to read on Medium.
RELATED: Chrissy Teigen issues lengthy public apology.
“Hi all. It has been a VERY humbling few weeks,” she began. “I know I’ve been quiet, and lord knows you don’t want to hear about me, but I want you to know I’ve been sitting in a hole of deserved global punishment, the ultimate ‘sit here and think about what you’ve done.’”
“Not a day, not a single moment has passed where I haven’t felt the crushing weight of regret for the things I’ve said in the past,” she continued. “As you know, a bunch of my old awful (awful, awful) tweets resurfaced. I’m truly ashamed of them.”
Stodden, 26, accused Teigen of telling them to kill themselves in private DMs after publicly tweeting that Stodden should “take ‘a dirt nap’.”
Teigen publicly apologised to Stodden in May, but Stodden claimed they never heard from her privately.