Study looks at influence of Trump rhetoric
Study: Ex-president first tied COVID-19 to China
After the ex-president used #chinesevirus on Twitter, the term proliferated.
The week after then-President Donald Trump first used the hashtag #chinesevirus on Twitter, the number of people using the hashtag increased more than tenfold, and they were much more likely to include anti-Asian hashtags than those who used #covid19 in their tweets.
Anti-Asian bias and attacks have grown exponentially over the past year in conjunction with anti-Chinese rhetoric. This week’s deadly shooting in Atlanta, in which six of the eight people killed were of Asian descent, has contributed to fears throughout the Asian-American community. Trump’s use of the phrase in speeches and on Twitter, which critics called racist, preceded a cascade of its use by others online. The mean number of daily users in the #covid19 group rose by 379% after Trump’s tweet, compared with an increase of #chinesevirus by 8,351%.
“There were a lot of arguments that ‘Chinese virus’ was a scientific term and was no different than COVID-19. But in fact, you see a large difference,” said Yulin Hswen, a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco.
The hashtags used in conjunction with #chinesevirus included expletives aimed at China, Chinese people and Asians in general as well as hashtags that advocated killing Chinese people.
She was one of a group of researchers who tracked the number of antiAsian hashtags that were used together with the neutral hashtag #covid19 compared with #chinesevirus. They found evidence of an association between the latter phrase and anti-Asian language. The associations show the majority of people associated #chinesevirus with negative statements and meant it to have a stigmatizing effect, Hswen said. Overall, half of tweets that used #chinesevirus included antiAsian hashtags while only 20% of those that used #covid19 did, according to research published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health.
The hashtags used in conjunction with #chinesevirus included expletives aimed at China, Chinese people and Asians in general as well as hashtags that advocated killing Chinese people, bombing Chinese cities as well as racist attacks on all things Asian. The findings come from an analysis of 1% of Twitter’s real-time streaming data the week before and the week after Trump first used the hashtag on March 16, 2020. Trump’s tweet read “The United States will be powerfully supporting those industries, like Airlines and others, that are particularly affected by the Chinese Virus. We will be stronger than ever before!” Twitter removed the tweet, and Trump’s entire account, on Jan. 8, citing concerns that he would incite further violence after supporters rioted at the Capitol.