Negative Asian American tropes have been around for a long time online, but started to increase last March, when parts of the United States were blocked because of the coronavirus. That month, politicians including Rep. Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, and Rep. Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, used the terms “Wuhan virus” and “Chinese coronavirus” to refer to Covid-19 in their tweets.
These terms then started the trend online, according to a study by the University of California, Berkeley. On the day that Gosar posted his tweet, the use of the term “Chinese virus” increased by 650% on Twitter; a day later, there was an 800 percent increase in its use in conservative news articles, the study found.
Mr. Trump also posted eight times on Twitter last March about the “Chinese virus”, causing vitriolic reactions. In the response section of one of his posts, a Trump supporter replied, “U caused the virus”, directing the comment to an Asian Twitter user who cited US mortality statistics for Covid-19. The Trump fan added a slander about Asians.
In a study this week at the University of California, San Francisco, researchers who examined 700,000 tweets before and after Trump’s posts in March 2020 found that people who posted the hashtag #chinesevirus were more likely to use racist hashtags, including #bateatingchinese .
“There has been a lot of discussion that the ‘Chinese virus’ is not racist and that it can be used,” said Yulin Hswen, assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of California, San Francisco, who conducted the research. But the term, she said, has become “a rallying cry to be able to bring together and galvanize people who have these feelings, as well as normalize racist beliefs”.
Representatives for Trump, McCarthy and Gosar did not respond to requests for comment.
The misinformation linking the coronavirus to anti-Asian beliefs has also increased in the past year. Since last March, there have been almost eight million mentions of anti-Asian speeches online, many of them false, according to Zignal Labs, a media insights company.
Increased attacks against Asian Americans
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- Eight people, including six women of Asian descent, were killed in shootings at massage parlors in Atlanta. The suspect’s motives are being investigated, but Asian communities in the United States are on alert because of an increase in attacks against Asian Americans in the past year.
- A torrent of hatred and violence against Asian Americans in the United States began last spring, in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Community leaders say the prejudice was fueled by the rhetoric of former President Trump, who referred to the coronavirus as the “China virus”.
- In New York, a wave of xenophobia and violence has been exacerbated by the economic consequences of the pandemic, which has dealt a severe blow to New York’s Asian-American communities. Many community leaders say that racist attacks are being ignored by the authorities.
- In January, an 84-year-old man from Thailand was violently thrown to the ground in San Francisco, resulting in his death in a hospital two days later. The attack, captured on video, became a rallying cry.
In one example, an April Fox News article that went viral without a basis, said the coronavirus was created in a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan and launched intentionally. The article was liked and shared more than a million times on Facebook and retweeted 78,800 times on Twitter, according to data from Zignal and CrowdTangle, a Facebook tool for social media analysis.