Algeria's Imane Khelif watches during her women's 66kg preliminaries round of 16 boxing match against Italy's Angela Carini during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. Photo: Mohd Rasfan / AFP
A rancorous debate over an Olympic boxer and violent riots in the UK both trace back to rampant misinformation online - and one social media platform in particular.
Jesse Watters raised the spectre of death while introducing the former swimmer Riley Gaines on his Fox News show last week.
"I think a woman's going to die at some point," he said.
The pair were talking about the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, who they believed was hitting people too hard in the traditionally non-violent sport of . . . boxing.
Khalif medalled in the women’s welterweight boxing this week, and no one ended up in the morgue.
But Watters and Gaines' exchange was just a tiny fraction of a generalised freakout from conservative pundits — particularly in the US — over Khelif’s Olympic participation.
Hear Mediawatch's report on these issues in this week's show here
The mass-meltdown was over the fact that in these pundits’ eyes, Khelif is a man, a guy, or - in the words of Fox News’s Jeanine Pirro - a “so-called person”.
Some of these commentators claimed that she and another boxer caught up in the rancour, Taiwan's Lin Yu-ting, have XY chromosomes, elevated testosterone, or both.
Others have gone further. The Boston Globe called Khelif transgender in an article headline.
On Newstalk ZB, sports reporter Guy Heveldt also hinted at that possibility live on air with breakfast host Mike Hosking, shortly after Heveldt heard about the controversy for the first time.
"It's something that's happening in society a lot more in terms of people changing their genders and that sort of thing, but in those sorts of sports like boxing where it is so physical, I don't think you can take risks," he said.
There may be more people changing their gender these days, but Khelif is not one of them.
She and Yu-ting were assigned female at birth and have lived their whole lives as female.
Moreover in Algeria, changing gender is illegal.
IOC spokesman Mark Adams has repeatedly made that clear to reporters in Paris.
"This is not a transgender issue," he said. "They were born as girls, registered as female passports, have fought at the senior level for six years with no issues."
The Boston Globe retracted its headline and and apologised. As for the other claims about hormones and chromosomes, they’re also — to put it generously — pretty iffy.
All the medical opinions being confidently bandied about stem from opaque, as-yet unreleased tests from a Russian-led boxing organisation that’s currently banned from Olympic participation due to its alleged corruption.
That organisation — the IBA — has given conflicting information about what its tests actually show, and in the eyes of Adams, the whole process around them has been “impossibly flawed”.
To their credit, many media outlets - local and international - have tried to get some of these facts across.
The New Zealand Herald has been in trouble for using AI to write its editorials lately. But its editorial on Khalif, published last Saturday was an enlightening take on a boxer it said was unjustifiably turned into a talking point in an increasingly bitter debate about trans participation in sport.
The same paper, and its NZME stablemate Newstalk ZB, published a useful explainer on the issue by Bonnie Jansen, while 1News has run its own fact-checks.
Gold medallist Algeria's Imane Khelif poses on the podium during the medal ceremony for the women's 66kg final boxing category during the Paris 2024 Olympic Games at the Roland-Garros Stadium, in Paris on 9 August 2024. Photo: MAURO PIMENTEL / AFP
Meanwhile RNZ’s The Panel and NZME's podcast The Front Page both aired professor in sociology of sport and gender Holly Thorpe.
"Gender is much more complex than just testosterone," she told RNZ.
"We have a really long history in sport of assuming if women are good in sport they might be men masquerading as women."
But the experts may as well have been bailing water out of a leaky boat.
For every media explainer, there were thousands of misleading posts on social media, and most particularly the platform formerly known as Twitter, X.
It was there that deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters called Khelif’s first round defeat of Italian boxer Angela Carini "a shocking example of why biological men should not compete in women’s sports”.
He was joined by politicians like Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance and Italy's PM Giorgia Meloni.
Meanwhile, Harry Potter author JK Rowling imputed some kind of malice to Khalif hitting someone in the 'hitting people competition,' accusing the boxer of having the “smirk of a male . . . enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head”.
UK riots sparked by social media
The misplaced jabs at Khelif aren’t the only misinformation on X to have real-world consequences this month.
A protester holding a piece of concrete walks towards riot police as clashes erupt in Bristol on 3 August 3, 2024. Photo: JUSTIN TALLIS / AFP
In the UK, far-right anti-immigration protesters rioted after X users published a false name for the person who stabbed children in Southport. They also wrongly said that person was a Muslim.
Those lies were amplified by the likes of influencers Tommy Robinson — a convicted criminal — and Andrew Tate — who’s currently facing charges of rape, human trafficking and forming a criminal gang in Romania.
On The News Agents podcast, journalist Lewis Goodall linked the boxing controversy and the street violence to the same source: online misinformation.
He blamed social media commentators for leaping to judgement without the full facts - and political figures who should know better for spreading misinformation with disastrous effects.
"Before you know where you are, you have massive furores about both, which in both cases can be about very little.
"They are parables of our time of the absolutely plague of politicised online misinformation, for which, let's be honest, we in the media in particular still feel like we have no real answer."
That problem is so pernicious on X because its owner not only tolerates prejudice and misinformation — he actively participates in it.
Elon Musk — not deterred by the fact Khelif isn’t a man — has reposted calls for so-called “men” to be kept out of women’s sports.
On the Southport protests, he’s said that “civil war is inevitable”, alarming the UK government.
"This is why so many of these strands do lead back to Twitter, to X," said Goodall. "It has become a fulcrum for these views to become normalised."
X has never exactly been a bastion of enlightened debate.
Riot police face protestors in Bristol, southern England, on 3 August 3 during the 'Enough is Enough' demonstration held in reaction to the fatal stabbings in Southport on 29 July. Photo: JUSTIN TALLIS / AFP
But under Musk’s stewardship, it’s become a place where abuse is rife and lies go virtually unchecked.
It’s turned into — in the eyes of The Guardian’s Carole Cadwalladr — a polarisation engine.
You can see that engine in action here on the timeline of The Platform's presenter Leah Panapa.
Last Friday morning on X she reposted other's comments calling Khelif "a man punching a woman”.
Photo: Twitter/X
That afternoon, former league player and boxing promoter Dean Lonergan appeared on her Platform show.
He made the case for Khelif.
"She presents as a woman, has lived her entire life as a woman, but has advantages in her genetic makeup. Is that any different to Usain Bolt having genetic makeup that makes him a wonderful runner?"
Lonergan backed the IOC’s handling of the issue.
"It's a hard call to make - but I would suggest the IOC's got it right."
At that point, Panapa made a surprised noise. It may have been the sound of an online bubble being pierced.
More of these moments would be welcome. But to get them, we could have to log off.
