‘Toxic positivity’

Thank goodness we have a deluge of feel good news in the on-going 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. The back-to-back wins of young Filipino gymnast Carlo Edriel Yulo could not come at a better time. While the gold hauls of Yulo at the Olympics were personal victories of a highly dedicated athlete like him, his international glory reaches down to the next generations of Filipinos.

Yulo prides himself as the first Filipino sportsman to win two gold medals and beating the best of the participating athletes in gymnastics at the Olympics. Yulo’s epic victory placed the Philippines one step higher in the medal standings of country participants at the Olympic Games. From the one gold medal earned by Filipina weightlifter Hidilyn Diaz at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, Yulo won two gold medals at the Paris Olympics. Such feat came after a hundred years since our country’s athletes first joined the Olympic Games, held every four years.

About 10,000 athletes coming from 206 countries are competing in the 2024 Paris Olympics. Diminutive in height, Yulo stood tall with his extraordinary strength on the floor exercises and vault in the gymnastics competitions. We could only share the pride of Yulo when the Philippine national anthem was played twice, one day after the other, while our country’s tricolor was raised in the top middle spot, ahead of the two other flags of the athletes he beat.

Long before his gymnastics skills were spotted by sports advocate Cynthia Carreon, Yulo went through the same experience of being an unknown wannabe athlete. Yulo got the biggest break when he won gold medals in the Southeast Games. That began the generous stream of donors that funded Yulo’s further training in his gymnastic games here and abroad.

Coming out of the woodwork now are the usual naysayers that all Filipino athletes of Olympic caliber deserve better training and support like what Yulo got. Now dubbed as the “golden boy” of the Philippines, Yulo certainly knows the plight of his fellow athletes and can relate with their laments.

Our nation’s rejoicing Yulo’s victorious feat at the Olympics is not a case of “toxic positivity” to cover up what ails Philippine sports.

From Google search, “toxic positivity” is defined as the belief that people should maintain a positive mindset no matter how dire or difficult a situation is. While there are benefits to being optimistic and engaging in positive thinking, “toxic positivity” rejects all difficult emotions in favor of a cheerful and often falsely positive façade. It occurs when encouraging statements are expected to minimize or eliminate painful emotions, creating pressure to be unrealistically optimistic without considering the circumstances of the situation.

Its opposite is “toxic negativity,” when a person will regularly criticize others, either to their face but more commonly behind their back, to other members of their negativity tribe.

We learned this buzzword from the just concluded Information Integrity Forum 2024 held in Sydney. The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and the Centre for Media Transition (CMT) organized the two-day forum tackling generative artificial intelligence, or GenAI for short. This year’s forum brought together four senior editors/ journalists from each of the four invited countries, namely, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines, with Australia as host.

It was Uni Lubis, editor-in-chief of the IDN Times of Indonesia, who raised the specter of “toxic positivity” that Indonesian people have to live with. Lubis cited there are 43,000 online media operating all over Indonesia. According to her, 61 percent of their so-called Gen-Z population rely for information and news on YouTube and TikTok. Yet, there is low digital literacy among Indonesians. Thus, she lamented, their people accept hook, line and sinker, including the lies dished out in social media.

But much worse, Lubis deplored, the Indonesian government can shut down internet services by a mere letter from any of their ministers in the name of security.

In her keynote address at our forum, Michelle Rowland, Member of Parliament who heads the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA), revealed 75 percent of Australians consider online or digital media as a concern in spreading “harmful” dis-information and mis-information. “And the Australian government takes this threat seriously. Doing nothing is not an option,” Rowlands declared.

There is now a pending proposed legislation in the Australian Parliament that would mandate the “big tech” platforms like Meta, Google, YouTube, TikTok, etc. to take responsibility for the spread of dis-information or mis-information and outright “fake news” and “deep fake” genAIs. Strongly endorsed and supported by the ACMA, the proposed bill naturally has been getting a strong push back from the affected sectors.

Amid our own problems on the misleading information and outright dis-information campaigns with the aid of social media technology, our job as editors to discern the truth and the facts becomes more difficult. As I’ve previously pointed out, the so-called “information warfare” is intensifying and the media is at the center of the battlefield for the hearts and minds of the people.

With the “deep fakes” and “fake news” coming out loosely in media, wherever it originated, the onset of political fever in the Philippines ahead of the May 2025 elections bodes more challenges for us in media.

Our own government officials like Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) Secretary Ivan John Uy could not agree more and warned of more “deep fakes” proliferating in social media leading up to the 2025 midterm elections.

“We need a new law. Actually, I think we need to have a more comprehensive law rather than bits and pieces of legislation that address small items or specific items,” Uy urged. The DICT is in a position to draft a bill for this purpose. So he should bring this appeal to our lawmakers in Congress.

However, Uy conceded that many of these social media companies have no offices in the Philippines, and that makes them virtually untouchable while being highly profitable operating here. The DICT should take the lead to combat these online contents, whether they ply “toxic positivity” or “toxic negativity.”