Study finds Trump’s ‘Chinese virus’ tweets closely linked to anti-Asian hate online

Experts say location or ethnicity should not be attached to diseases

Asians witnessed a sharp rise in online hate and racist attacks after former president Donald Trump used the phrase “Chinese virus” to describe Covid-19 in March last year, a new study has found.

Published in the American Journal of Public Health, the research by UC San Francisco found that days after the former president tweeted the racist rhetoric on 16 March 2020, the number of coronavirus-related tweets with anti-Asian hashtags rose precipitously.

The study examined nearly 700,000 tweets containing nearly 1.3 million hashtags, the week before and after Mr Trump’s tweet.

It found that the number of daily users who used #covid19 rose by 379 per cent while those using #chinesevirus to describe the pandemic increased by a staggering 8,351 per cent.

The results come in the wake of the shooting rampage in Atlanta that killed six women of Asian origin.

“These results may be a proxy of growth in anti-Asian sentiment that was not as prevalent as before,” said Yulin Hswen, an assistant professor of epidemiology at UC, San Francisco and the study’s lead author.

“Using racial terms associated with a disease can result in the perpetuation of further stigmatisation of racial groups.”

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The researchers further found that 50 per cent of users who adopted the hashtag #chinesevirus paired it with overtly racist hashtags as compared to 20 per cent of those who adopted #covid19 to refer to the disease.

Recently, the White House also slammed Mr Trump, saying that there is “no question” that racist rhetoric used by him and his allies has led to a spike in discrimination against Asian Americans.

“I think there’s no question that some of the damaging rhetoric that we saw during the prior administration - calling Covid the ‘Wuhan virus’ or other things - led to perceptions of the Asian American community that are inaccurate, unfair... has elevated threats against Asian Americans, and we’re seeing that around the country,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Wednesday.

Though Mr Trump had previously condemned xenophobic attacks against Asian Americans but he continued with the use of the incendiary term, saying the phrase is “not racist at all.”

“It comes from China. That’s why,” he said, as he tried to explain why he continues to use the term. “I want to be accurate.”

Ms Hswen, however, said the results from the research demonstrates the importance of using neutral language while naming diseases and other threats to public health. She further expressed her exasperation after the former president again referred to the coronavirus vaccine as “China virus” vaccine.

“Chinese virus, China virus, Wuhan virus, or any derivative of these terms is not something we should be using,” she said. “We should not be attaching location or ethnicity to diseases.”