Use of racist hashtags on Twitter rose following Donald Trump’s ‘Chinese virus’ tweet
2 min readThe number of Covid-19-related tweets containing anti-Asian views increased significantly in the week after former US President Donald Trump tweeted about “the Chinese virus” last year, new research has found.
The study from the University of California, San Francisco examined close to 700,000 tweets containing nearly 1.3 million hashtags the week before Mr Trump tweeted about those “affected by the Chinese virus” on 16 March 2020.
Users who adopted the hashtag #chinesevirus were far more likely to accompany it with racist hashtags such #commieflu and #bateatingchinese. In comparison, those who used the World Health Organisation (WHO) official classification, #covid19, were much less likely to include racist terms in their messages.
The US has recently experienced a wave of violent attacks on people of Asian descent, after a man shot and killed eight people, six of whom were women of Asian descent, in an attack on three massage parlours in Atlanta earlier this week.
“These results may be a proxy of growth in anti-Asian sentiment that was not as prevalent as before,” said Yulin Hswen, ScD, MPH, an assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UCSF and a member of the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute.
“Using racial terms associated with a disease can result in the perpetuation of further stigmatisation of racial groups.”
“The researchers manually coded each of the hashtags, labelling a hashtag anti-Asian if it expressed hostility towards the region, people or culture of Asia; demonstrated fear, mistrust and hatred of Asians; supported restrictions on Asian immigration; or used derogatory language or condoned punishment of Asian countries and people,” according to the report.”
“The results showed a large difference in anti-Asian sentiment between the kind of hashtags that appeared in tweets with #covid19 and those that appeared in tweets with #chinesevirus. About 20 per cent of the nearly 500,000 hashtags with #covid19 showed anti-Asian sentiment, but anti-Asian bias was apparent in half of the more than 775,000 hashtags with #chinesevirus.”
The study, which was published in the American Journal of Public Health, demonstrates how important it is to use neutral language when naming diseases and other threats to public health, Ms Hswen added.
“Chinese virus, China virus, Wuhan virus, or any derivative of these terms is not something we should be using,” she said. “We should not be attaching location or ethnicity to diseases.”
