Association of “#covid19” Versus “#chinesevirus” With Anti-Asian Sentiments on Twitter: March 9–23, 2020

Authored by ajph.aphapublications.org and submitted by mvea

Objectives. To examine the extent to which the phrases, “COVID-19” and “Chinese virus” were associated with anti-Asian sentiments.

Methods. Data were collected from Twitter’s Application Programming Interface, which included the hashtags “#covid19” or “#chinesevirus.” We analyzed tweets from March 9 to 23, 2020, corresponding to the week before and the week after President Donald J. Trump’s tweet with the phrase, “Chinese Virus.” Our analysis focused on 1 273 141 hashtags.

Results. One fifth (19.7%) of the 495 289 hashtags with #covid19 showed anti-Asian sentiment, compared with half (50.4%) of the 777 852 hashtags with #chinesevirus. When comparing the week before March 16, 2020, to the week after, there was a significantly greater increase in anti-Asian hashtags associated with #chinesevirus compared with #covid19 (P < .001).

Conclusions. Our data provide new empirical evidence supporting recommendations to use the less-stigmatizing term “COVID-19,” instead of “Chinese virus.” (Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print March 18, 2021: e1–e9. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306154)

somethingstrang on March 20th, 2021 at 16:46 UTC »

“In addition, we did not code hashtags targeted to the Chinese government and conspiracy theories as anti-Asian. We took this approach because some hashtags are used to categorize information (e.g., curate a list of theories related the pandemic’s origins). This likely made our analyses more conservative by underestimating antipathy directed toward Asians.”

TheDovahofSkyrim on March 20th, 2021 at 15:45 UTC »

To be fair, anyone attacking Asians because a virus most likely originated in an Asian country, probably are not the brightest cookies.

TeamDoubleDown on March 20th, 2021 at 14:26 UTC »

How do you control for bots retweeting in this study?