Asian Americans have reported thousands of incidents of harassment and violence over the past year.
A single tweet from then-President Donald Trump during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic popularized the term “Chinese Virus” and was followed by an increase in anti-Asian rhetoric on the platform, according to a new study.
Trump first wrote “Chinese virus” in a tweet on March 16, 2020, just as the U.S. was beginning to grasp the seriousness of the public health emergency. Almost overnight, “#chinesevirus” began rivaling the hashtag “#covid19” on Twitter as the top reference to the virus, according to a new peer-reviewed study in the Publication of the American Public Health Association.
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Significantly, researchers found that over half of the tweets containing the hashtag “#chinesevirus” showed “anti-Asian sentiment,” compared to fewer than 20 percent of the tweets that included the hashtag “#covid19,” between March 9 and March 23, 2020. The researchers analyzed nearly 1.3 million hashtags as part of the study.