Imagine achieving the milestone of winning two golds and one silver followed by two silvers and one gold at two consecutive Winter Olympics. You have just become a freestyle skier who has won the most medals in the history of the Olympic Games. The whole world is watching you. You spent countless hours training in the snow, challenging your physical limits, overcoming injuries, and reaching this moment.
What an honor!
At the press conference after the match, you, a person who is at the peak of your career, hold a microphone and expect questions about your skiing skills. You might want to share the technical difficulties of your jumps and share the joy of success. However, an AFP reporter pointedly asks if you view your two silver medals as “the two golds lost” (Fox Sports, 2026).
What a ridiculous question!
A Heartbreaking True Story
This was the exact reality Eileen Gu faced at the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics.
When she responded to this unfriendly question by asserting her historic achievements, her answer wasn’t met with respect. However, it triggered a massive avalanche of online hate speech. People who had never met her and who knew nothing about freestyle skiing suddenly became the harshest judges of her character.
In fact, the malice directed at Gu didn’t just start this year, and it didn’t only exist on the internet. This online cyberbullying which is full of hate speech began as early as four years ago during the Beijing Winter Olympics and has even spread into the real world.
Gu recently revealed that since she chose to represent China in 2022, the online hate speech has been relentless, and it even led to her being physically assaulted, robbed on the streets near Stanford University, and receiving death threats (The Spun, 2026; Hall, 2026). Hate speech on the Internet turned into physical dangers.
Eileen Gu’s terrible experience is not just an isolated celebrity event.
This is a wake-up call for our modern society. This escalation from cyberbullying to personal assault is driven by multiple factors which exposes the complete failure of current digital platform governance. When social platforms allow geopolitical tensions and identity biases to spread uncontrollably, hate speech will definitely escape from the digital space to the real world (Ma, 2025) and even it will become physical harm.
We urgently need to give up the fantasy that digital platforms can regulate themselves successfully (Flew, 2021) and start building a safer digital environment for everyone.
After all, you and I are both members of this digital community. We share our lives, our thoughts, and our photos online every day. None of us can guarantee that one day such harm will not happen to us or our families.
Women Under Scrutiny and Hybrid Identity
Hate speech is defined as discriminatory or derogatory language directed at people with specific characteristics, and when we analyze such online speech, considering socio-political factors is necessary (Parekh, 2012, as cited in Flew, 2021; Flew, 2017, as cited in Flew, 2021).
The cyberbullying against Eileen Gu actually reveals a dark truth about our society. When women break stereotypes and gender expectations, it usually leads to platformed gender-based violence.
Let us think about a double standard here. If a male athlete confidently shuts down a disrespectful question from a reporter, he is often praised as a strong leader with a tough personality. However, the public often expects famous female athletes to be docile and grateful, rather than rebellious (Ma, 2025).
When Gu called the reporter’s question “ridiculous”, she broke this stereotype and gender expectation. Therefore, this caused public tone policing, which means disciplining women’s words and behaviors to punish those who deviate from traditional gender expectations (Li, 2024). People stopped caring about her athletic talent and started analyzing her facial expressions and tone of voice. In Gu’s case, the public defined her objective statement about her achievements as arrogance (Fox Sports, 2026), and then they used this as a reasonable excuse for their hate speech.
Catalyzed by Gu’s hybrid identity, this hostility towards women quickly evolved into a much more destructive geopolitical issue. As a Chinese-American who was born and educated in the US, Gu chose to represent China in two consecutive Winter Olympics. Because of this complex background, she is no longer allowed to just be an athlete, and she is forced to become a political symbol.
Meanwhile, the media in both China and the US started to deliberately frame her story to cater to their own political agendas. This conflict of political concepts eventually triggered a wave of politically driven cyberbullying, which took her dual nationality as the biggest point of controversy and spread rumors and insulted her accordingly (Ma, 2025).
What’s worse, when influential politicians personally make hate speeches, this cyber violence seems to be encouraged and legalized by politics to some extent. According to The Guardian (2026), during the 2026 Winter Olympics, American politician JD Vance publicly criticized Gu in the mainstream media. He implied that her behavior was disloyal because she enjoyed the educational resources of the United States, but represented China to compete with the United States for honor. In the face of this public accusation, Gu said in an interview that she believed that her mixed identity made her a “punching bag” of American politics (The Guardian, 2026).
The inflammatory remarks of the American politician, coupled with Gu’s mixed identity, the superposition of dual factors directly leads and stimulates users on mainstream digital platforms in the West to inflict more violent hate speech and cyberbullying on her. In this cyberbullying, politicians lit the fire, and Internet users became a burning flame. All of them tried to kill a young girl with words.
Platformed Racism and the Failure of Self-Regulation
In the face of such overwhelming cyberbullying, we must ask: Where is the ability of a digital platform that controls large amounts of data and claims to build a healthy community? These large-scale digital platforms have the world’s smartest engineers and billions of dollars in revenue. Why can they not stop the spread of hate speech?
The answer may be more disturbing than we think: platforms are not powerless, and even to some extent, they are accomplices of this kind of cyberbullying.
Matamoros-Fernández (2017) points out a concept of “platformed racism”. She believes that digital platforms will amplify racism and hate speech, because the recommendation algorithms they use for their own interests will obviously encourage such conflicts between groups.
Imagine what kind of topic can attract users’ attention and make them keep sliding the screen? Is it a rational discussion or a crusade full of controversy, anger and geopolitical opposition?
The algorithm is very clear about this.
In the Eileen Gu‘s case, posts with nationalism and prejudice can bring a very high click rate. Driven by commercial interests, algorithms will constantly push this hate speech to more people, so these remarks force more and more users to be involved, and people are forced to stand on the opposite side. As Flew (2021) points out, algorithms increasingly affect people’s perception of certain events, which in turn affects people’s behavior. Finally, a serious cyberbullying occurred. Therefore, the platform is actually an accomplice to the prevalence of hate speech.
In this situation, the content moderation system that digital platforms are proud of will naturally fail. Although these platforms often tell the public that they have artificial intelligence systems to clean up hate speech, human language is very complicated. Because hate speech is often deeply rooted in the local cultural context and local slang, platforms like Facebook that adopt universal rules and AI filtering systems cannot fully identify it (Sinpeng et al., 2021). Therefore, it is not enough to solely rely on the platform’s self-regulation when controlling hate speech.
Virtual Speech, Real Blood and Tears
Why do we have to demand immediate strict regulation and reduction of hate speech? This is because the harm caused not only stays on the screen. Many people may mistakenly believe that online language does not hurt anyone because they believe that all victims can get rid of harm by turning off their phones or laptops. But the reality is more cruel and dark.
Hate speech and cyberbullying can destroy a person from the inside out. Research shows that this endless online abuse will directly cause victims to suffer from severe anxiety and depression, and even destroy their self-esteem (Ma, 2025).
Cyberbullying can cause harm to people.. Picture: Freepik (n.d.)
Please imagine: When you wake up every morning, you will always receive thousands of messages from strangers to your mobile phone or social account. Everyone tells you that you are worthless, ugly, or should die.
What a terrible and suffocating scene!
Sometimes, this kind of verbal harm is even fatal. A tragedy on the Chinese Internet in 2023 is the best evidence of how virtual words lead to death in the real world. That year, a young girl named Zheng Linghua had just received an offer for a postgraduate course, but faced a large-scale hate speech attack for sharing photos of her dyed pink hair on social media (The Paper, 2023). In this endless cyberbullying, the continuous pressure and abuse from thousands of anonymous accounts pushed her into the abyss of severe depression, and she finally ended her life in despair (The Paper, 2023; Li, 2024).
From Eileen Gu’s experience to Zheng Linghua’s death, these heartbreaking events give us a clear warning: hate speech and cyberbullying can actually hurt and kill. Therefore, strict regulation of hate speech is actually a matter of life and death.
Freedom of Speech Does Not Equal Freedom to Hate
In the face of calls for strict regulation, platforms often use “freedom of speech” as a shield. Of course, we live in a free society, and we really need the right to freedom of speech. However, we must draw an uncrossable red line in our minds: freedom of speech is absolutely not equal to the freedom of hatred.
Why do we have zero tolerance for hate speech?
Because it not only constantly injects distrust and hostility into society, but also completely tramples on the human dignity of the victims (Flew, 2021). Human morality reminds us that when language becomes a weapon to incite violence and target specific groups, they have crossed the boundaries of freedom of speech. This kind of persecution of others in the name of freedom of speech should be bound by the law.
Eileen Gu’s experience during the Winter Olympics exposed the lie that digital platforms can achieve self-regulation successfully. When algorithms amplify hatred of profits and the platform becomes a hotbed of hate speech, it is absurd to rely solely on the company’s understanding of ethical supervision.
What we need is a binding digital supervision policy to promote the digital platform to be truly responsible for the supervision of user content. Only by combining these two can we prevent the uncontrolled spread of hate speech. In this digital society, we must learn to respect individual diversity instead of zero tolerance for differences.
Protecting the human dignity of every digital citizen means protecting ourselves. Because if we don’t intervene in hate speech, who can guarantee that they will always be safe and not become the next “punching bag” to be attacked?
References list
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Flew, T. (2021). Hate speech and online abuse. In Regulating platforms (pp. 91–96). Polity Press.
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Hall, J. (2026, February 20). Eileen Gu says she feels like a ‘punching bag’ amid Olympics backlash. FOX Sports Radio. https://foxsportsradio.iheart.com/content/2026-02-20-eileen-gu-says-she-feels-like-a-punching-bag-amid-olympics-backlash/
Li, Y. (2024). Pink hair as a cyberfeminist symbol: Online gender-based violence and the ‘PinkUp’ movement in China. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 26(7). https://vc.bridgew.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3338&context=jiws
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Sinpeng, A., Martin, F., Gelber, K., & Shields, K. (2021, July 5). Facebook: Regulating hate speech in the Asia Pacific [Final report]. University of Sydney & University of Queensland. https://r2pasiapacific.org/files/7099/2021_Facebook_hate_speech_Asia_report.pdf
The Spun. (2026, February 17). Eileen Gu was ‘physically assaulted’ over Olympics decision. https://thespun.com/olympics/eileen-gu-was-physically-assaulted-over-olympics-decision
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