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- Anti-Asian sentiment on Twitter soared after Trump used the term “Chinese virus” on March 16, 2020.
- Researchers at UC San Francisco analyzed posts from the week before and after Trump’s tweet.
- Asians in the United States have apparently been targeted because the coronavirus was first found in China.
- See more stories on the Insider business page.
Then-President Donald Trump’s first tweet about a “Chinese virus” sparked an increase in anti-Asian hashtags on Twitter, according to a study.
A peer-reviewed study published last Wednesday by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, found that the March 16, 2020 tweet was directly responsible for a major spike in anti-Asian hashtags.
Trump continued to use the term repeatedly on Twitter and in person during the pandemic. At the time of his tweet, there were 153,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19 worldwide and several US states had introduced emergency measures.
Researchers analyzed nearly 700,000 tweets using “# covid19” or “#chinesevirus” between March 9 and March 23. They said that 50% of the tweets using “#chinesevirus” and 20% of the tweets using “# covid19” showed anti-Asian sentiment.
“When comparing the week before March 16 [the date of Trump’s tweet] the following week, there was a significantly greater increase in anti-Asian hashtags associated with the #Chinese virus compared to # covid19, “they wrote.
Triumph.
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At the time, Trump defended his use of the term. “Because it comes from China. It is not racist at all.” told a reporter on March 18, referring to the fact that the new coronavirus was first found in Wuhan, China.
The use of terms like “Chinese virus” and “kung flu,” which Trump said publicly at a rally in June, has been accompanied by an increase in racist sentiment toward Asians in the United States.
An Ipsos poll conducted in late April found that more than 30% of Americans had witnessed someone blaming people of Asian descent for the coronavirus pandemic.
Attacks on Asians in the US increased by 150% in 2020, according to a study by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.
Last July, John C. Yang, president of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, told Insider that terms like “kung flu” result in physical and verbal abuse of Asians.
“That term plays on a racist stereotype in itself and is being used to stigmatize a community with regard to a medical problem that everyone should be around for,” Yang said.
“We should not try to find terms that alienate communities and harm communities even beyond the health crisis that we are already in.”
In recent months, violence against Asian Americans, closely related to the coronavirus, has been on the rise.
At a congressional hearing on the phenomenon Thursday, Rep. Grace Meng said Trump and other GOP figures had put “a bullseye on the back of Asian Americans across the country.”
The issue of violence against Asians made headlines again last week after a 21-year-old white man shot dead eight people, six of whom were Asian, in the Atlanta area on Tuesday.
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