After Indian-origin Nikhil Ravishankar was appointed as the new chief executive of Air New Zealand, the country’s media said they had to disable comments on social media as there was a barrage of racist remarks targeting Ravishankar’s ethnicity. Ravishankar was the chief digital officer of Air New Zealand before getting the major promotion which is the first for an Indian-origin person in the country.New Zealand Herald, Radio New Zealand, 1News said they had to disable comments as they can’t allow hatred. The New Zealand Herald issued a statement in which it clarified that there were several racist comments owing to which they had to take the extreme step. “We appreciate the high level of interest in this story but cannot safely moderate it at this time,” the news outlet said in a post in the comment thread.“We want to foster a safe online community by reducing instances of hate, racism, abuse and misinformation. We welcome your feedback on articles but there has to be some parameters, and these are explained in our community house rules…We cannot tolerate hate. We cannot tolerate abuse towards individuals in our stories or other commenters,” the company’s social media policy says. Radio New Zealand had to do the same on the social media post on Ravishankar’s appointment. “Under RNZ’s comments policy, we will proactively disable comments on posts which may attract abusive or harmful comments or when resources are required elsewhere,” a spokesperson for RNZ said. “In this instance, the comments were disabled after our monitoring found racist comments,” the spokesperson said. “We want people to feel safe and respected on our community forums and will continue to proactively disable comments where necessary. We will not tolerate harmful communications.”1News said it received a large number of comments on the post that announced Ravishankar’s appointment and a vast majority were inappropriate.
Who is Nikhil Ravishankar?
Nikhil Ravishankar was born in India but brought up in New Zealand. He studied in New Zealand — holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and a Bachelor of Commerce (Honours) from the University of Auckland. Before joining Air New Zealand, Ravishankar was Chief Digital Officer at Vector New Zealand (from 2017), and also worked as a Managing Director at Accenture across Hong Kong, Australia, and New Zealand, and in senior technology roles at Spark (formerly Telecom NZ).
