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Published on: November 10, 2023
Association of "#covid19" Versus "#chinesevirus" With Anti-Asian Sentiments on Twitter: March 9-23, 2020
Yulin Hswen1, Xiang Xu1, Anna Hing1
1Yulin Hswen is with the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco; and Computational Epidemiology Lab, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA. Xiang Xu is with the Department of Statistics, Boston University, Boston. Anna Hing and Gilbert C. Gee are with the Department of Community Health Sciences, University of California Los Angeles. Jared B. Hawkins and John S. Brownstein are with the Innovation Program, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston.
Abstract:
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."
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