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Singapore
This Week in Asia

Singapore’s biggest social media stories of 2023: from Jocelyn Chia’s MH370 joke to ‘girl math’

  • A Singapore-raised comedian’s bad-taste joke about the ill-fated Malaysia Airlines flight almost caused a diplomatic incident this year
  • Read on for more social media stories that set tongues wagging in the city state, including TikTok’s ‘zaddy’ CEO and flash-in-the-pan app Bondee

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An office building in Kuala Lumpur is illuminated with LED lights displaying “Pray for MH370” next to Malaysia’s landmark Petronas Twin Towers in 2014. A Singapore-raised comedian’s joke about the missing flight enraged Malaysia this year. Photo: AP
Kimberly Lim
While Singapore may be a small country, its capacity for online drama is surprisingly huge. From a comedian cancelled over an offensive joke to TikTok’s Singaporean CEO getting crowned a ‘zaddy’, here are some of the most hotly discussed topics to have swept Singaporean social media in 2023.

Comedian Jocelyn Chia enrages Malaysians

After a notorious 89-second clip of a joke about MH370, the Malaysia Airlines flight carrying 239 people that went missing in 2014, went viral, Singapore-raised comic Jocelyn Chia found herself thoroughly cancelled – and even hit with vague threats of being tracked down by Interpol.
Jocelyn Chia in a still from a TikTok video of her performance at a New York comedy club. Photo: TikTok/@ComedyCellarUSA
Jocelyn Chia in a still from a TikTok video of her performance at a New York comedy club. Photo: TikTok/@ComedyCellarUSA
Not only that, but her bad-taste joke in a New York comedy club prompted Singapore’s foreign affairs minister Vivian Balakrishnan to issue an apology to Malaysians, in which he said “she certainly does not speak for Singaporeans”.
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Malaysia’s then-foreign minister Zambry Abdul Kadir, meanwhile, condemned Chia’s “lack of sensitivity and empathy” towards the families of victims and Malaysians in general.
Yet on the other side of the world, the controversy catapulted Chia to a new level of fame in the United States, from where she told This Week in Asia that she had scored her own television special.

Her joke was aimed at the hypersensitivities surrounding politics, nationalism and identity in Singapore and neighbouring Malaysia – two nations bound by history and culture, but where jokes can sometimes turn into stereotypes and discrimination.

TikTok CEO crowned Gen Z’s ‘zaddy’

After TikTok’s Chief Executive Officer Chew Shou Zi was grilled for close to five hours by members of the US Congress in March, clips of the hearing in Washington quickly went viral on social media, where he earned the title of ‘zaddy’ for his good looks and mental dexterity.
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