TRUMP’S ‘CHINESE VIRUS’ TWEET SPURRED ANTI-ASIAN TWEETS, ATTACKS

On March 16, 2020, as COVID-19 was first spreading across the US, then-President Donald Trump issued a tweet about his support of US industries, saying that he would protect them from the “Chinese Virus.” What followed, a new study has found, was a steep rise in tweets containing anti-Asian hashtags as anti-Asian sentiments rose across the country, Sharon Zhang reported for Truthout.

The study, published Friday, March 19, 2021 (Saturday, March 20, 2021, in Manila), in the American Journal of Public Health, examined nearly 700,000 tweets and more than 1.2 million hashtags posted over the weeks surrounding Trump’s initial tweet about the “Chinese Virus,” and its authors found Trump’s tweet was likely the cause of a rise in the use of the #chinesevirus hashtag.

While the use of #covid19 only rose by 379 percent through the course of the study period, the use of #chinesevirus rose by 8,351 percent.

“The week before Trump’s tweet the dominant term [on Twitter] was #covid-19,” Yulin Hswen, study co-author and epidemiology professor at the University of California, San Francisco, told The Washington Post. “The week after his tweet, it was #chinesevirus.”

Those who used #chinesevirus were much more likely to attach other anti-Asian hashtags to the post than those who used #covid19, the study’s authors found.

While only one in five of the #covid19 tweets examined had anti-Asian sentiments, half of the tweets with #chinesevirus were anti-Asian. Over the two-week course of the study, anti-Asian hashtags rose from 12,000 to almost half a million.

Though the study’s authors didn’t examine whether these tweets were tied to the rise in anti-Asian sentiments and hate incidents offline, they do note that other studies have found that the use of hashtags promoting hate speech has been associated with hate crimes. “Hashtags allow information to travel beyond the initial social network and can form collations of speech,” the study authors wrote.

“This has led researchers to examine how hate-speech hashtags are associated with hate crimes. In this research, the variable that best predicted real-world violence was the hashtag used in the tweet.”

The study’s authors also note that Trump’s position as an authority was likely partially responsible for the rise in anti-Asian posts online, since “racist attitudes may be reinforced by institutional support,” they write. Some of the tweets they cited in the study were particularly violent and virulent, with anti-Asian slurs and hashtags like #bombchina.

Previous studies on similar subjects have also found an increase in racism against Mexicans and Latino people during the 2016 election when Trump was spewing racist statement after racist statement to gain support for his presidency.

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