“You inject hate into social media, it’s not completely going away.” “We’re working right now on kind of making that connection between hate on social media towards the Asian American community and actual acts of hate crimes on the ground,” said Hohl to Fox 13. The Stop AAPI Hate Initiative found that there were over 9,000 hate incidents during the first year of COVID. The messaging that blamed COVID-19 on China appeared to spill into public opinion, which led to increased discrimination. Over time, the volume of anti-Asian tweets went down but remained higher than before the pandemic. There were two spikes identified: the first at the end of January 2020, when COVID first arrived in the United States, and the second in mid-March, after President Donald Trump tweeted about the “Wuhan flu” and “Chinese virus.” The analysis is consistent with the findings of a 2021 study demonstrating that Trump’s tweet about the ‘Chinese Virus’ helped fuel anti-Asian hate on Twitter. However, anti-Asian hate language drastically increased between January and March of 2020. The researchers purchased 4,234,694 geolocated tweets from Twitter that were published between November 2019 and May 2020, classifying them as hateful or non-hateful based on the presence of keywords related to anti-Asian hate (‘kunglu,’ ‘Wuhanvirus,’ etc.) and put them on a map.įrom November 2019 to January 2020, there were low levels of hate 0-0.1% of daily tweets were hateful, according to the University of Utah study. We think that warrants a research perspective.” “During the onset of COVID, there were reports of hate crimes committed on Asians and Asian Americans in the U.S. “Once the hate is up, then the hate persists,” said Alexander Hohl, lead author of the study, told At the U. The rise in hate crimes against Asian Americans during the onset of the pandemic prompted researchers to investigate. “Oftentimes Asians in America are overlooked as targets of hate speech or hate crimes. “In American culture, we perceive Asians to be the model minority, right? They tend to do well academically and make money, or at least that’s our perception,” said Richard Medina, professor at the University of Utah and co-author of the study, in an interview with At the U. Researchers at The University of Utah analyzed millions of tweets from late 2019 to early 2020 and found a spike in anti-Asian hate on Twitter at the start of the pandemic. According to a recent study, anti-Asian hate language dramatically surged in 2020 on Twitter.