Man calls S'pore a 'fu**ing sh**' country, Internet rages, man gets fired within a day

The Internet works fast.

Nyi Nyi Thet | July 11, 2016, 11:57 AM

If you had a lazy Sunday, or decided to disconnect from the Internet for a day, you might not even have noticed the latest "blink and you miss it" Internet saga.

Here's what happened

Sonny Truyen, who according to his Facebook comment, is an Australian who recently arrived in Singapore.

Truyen, like most people, really wanted to play Pokemon Go. For those who don't know what Pokemon Go is, it's basically Pokemon mixed with Google maps.

Here's the problem though, Pokemon Go isn't available in a few countries yet, with one of them being Singapore.

Which resulted in this outburst from Truyen.

truyenori

And a response from a Singaporean who took offence with that characterisation, culminating in an intense back and forth.

truyen2

truyen3

truyen4

truyen5 Screenshots from Hardware Zone

99.co

The last point made by the Singaporean proved eerily prescient, as netizens quickly sourced out his place of work.

truyenlinkedin

Truyen had previously worked in Australia and Malaysia prior to moving to Singapore to work in 99.co this year.

99.co is a map based, real estate portal founded in 2014 by 4 co-founders, one of them being Darius Cheung (He'll come into play later).

Complaints

The new found information gave a credible platform for netizens to express their outrage, specifically 99.co's Facebook page.

truyencomp

truyencomp2 Screenshots from 99.co's Facebook page

Response

Here is where the speed in which the Internet works is established, now remember all of this took place over the course of a single day.

Usually companies put out a statement acknowledging the transgressions of their employees before conducting internal investigations in a less hurried manner.

Not 99.co though.

Their blog was updated after midnight to inform netizens that Truyen had been terminated from his contract.

The post was written by Darius Cheung, the aforementioned CEO of 99.co.

You can read the statement here, but Cheung gave a more succinct version of the announcement on local forum, Hardware Zone, where the anger had been most evident.

15 years of reading HWZ forum and finally signed up for an account!

Hi everyone, this is Darius, I am the CEO of 99.co.

And yes i am the one who hired Sonny as an SEO consultant. (and yes, he has been terminated immediately)

Thank you for everyone’s reaction, I am a proud Singaporean too and I apologise for the incident.

I’ve also written a full article regarding this and my related thoughts -

[ it seems i cannot post links - u can google it and find it on 99 co blog ]

IMHO, you have every right to be angry at this incident and Sonny specifically, I am too.

But I also sincerely hope that we would not generalise this to be a sweeping discrimination against Australians or Vietnamese or FT. We are better than that as a society!

Truyen has suspended all of his social media accounts.

And all of this in just one (sun)day.

 

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Top image from Hardware Zone's forum page

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