Currently, the NBA superstar Kyrie Irving is in big time trouble. On his post on Instagram, he put a link to a movie which included an anti-Jew content. Not only was he criticized, he got punished. He is going to miss at least 5 games, and until he finishes several requirments, like donating to a charity and meeting the NBA commisionar, he will not be able to get back to play the games, and remains unpayed. The whole issue became bigger because Kyrie didn’t apologize; in  a press conference, hough he did admit that there was a lack of responsibility, he didn’t say anything when he was asked whether he was anti-Jew or not. In the end, he did apologize through a post on Instagram, everyone was criticizing him for his behavior.

This is not the first time Kyrie has been controversial, he has been criticized for his “unique” personality. Though I do not know him in person, I could see that he has his own way of thinking. He thinks that the earth is flat, and he missed over half of last seasons game because he didn’t get vaccinated. Considering all those problems, Nike has recently announced that their relationship with Kyrie is over, which surprised me a lot: Kyrie is a talented player and one of the most popular players.

All these issues related to Kyrie made me think about if his punishment was appropriate. Even though his act was not the best thing to do, his post had nothing other than the link to the video. No agrresive words or anything like that. I feel like his punishment is too harsh, and he should be playing the games, which is his duty as an NBA player. I also thought that we need to think about how responsible we should be about our posts on the media. In the post, Kyrie didn’t directly offend people of a certain religion. Putting a link to an antisemtic documentary is truly an irresponsible act, but the act itself won’t be too big of a deal. The biggest problem of the issue is that the film was antisemtic, and that he didn’t apologize. We have the right to freely post what we want to say on the media, but we do need to be considerate. I wouldn’t write anything about religious thoughts on the media in the first place, but this incident made me think about how I should deal with social media.