The Instagram Story
On 24 May 2022, the Anytime Fitness Tanjong Pagar Instagram page posted an Instagram story containing the n-word. The caption was appended to a video showing people working out at the gym.
— Joy Luther (@JoyLuther) May 24, 2022
According to @wali_talks on Twitter, the Instagram story was up for at least 7 hours. Wali also questioned if the publisher of the Instagram story was Black.
A tweet critcising the gym’s social media post garnered more than 650 retweets and 1,000 likes. One user even stated that he wished to cancel his Anytime Fitness membership.
https://twitter.com/hshqal/status/1529306245441593349
Others noted how some in the “quote tweets” section of the viral tweet did not see anything wrong with the gym’s use of the n-word.
the quote retweets just goes to show people don’t give a shit about racial slurs when it’s not directed to them, it’s appalling https://t.co/JlVsVxUmKC
— zatanna (@haciyahyahyah) May 23, 2022
The Apology
After some public backlash, the gym took the Instagram story down. It first issued an apology via Instagram stories. It added that internal action will be taken against the staff who posted the story,.
It then issued a further apology by way of an Instagram post.
In the caption to the latter apology, the gym revealed that a part-time staff posted the Instagram story in question:
Dear members and public,
A story post was posted yesterday by one of our part-time staff member. It contained racial slurs. We admit that it is very inappropriate and disrespectful. Please accept our sincere apologies as we take steps to improve ourselves moving forward.
In the comments section of the apology, Anytime Fitness Tanjong Pagar accepted that there were no excuses for what happened, and called the incident a “lesson learnt”.
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