Former President Donald Trump's remarks calling the coronavirus as the "China virus" helped spark Asian hate content on social media platform Twitter, according to a study.
A study from American Journal of Public Health found that Trump's tweet led to an increase in anti-Asian content, after analyzing nearly 1.3 million hashtags.
The researchers collected data from Twitter’s Application Programming Interface, which included the hashtags “#covid19” or “#chinesevirus” from March 9 to 23, 2020.
On March 16 last year, Trump first tweeted the phrase "ChineseVirus" which saw an increase in anti-Asian hashtags and a rise in hate crimes in the succeeding weeks.
"Anti-Asian sentiment depicted in the tweets containing the term 'Chinese Virus' likely perpetuated racist attitudes and parallels the anti-Asian hate crimes that have occurred since," said Dr. Yulin Hswen, an assistant professor of epidemiology at UC, San Francisco and the study's lead author, in a report from ABC News.
In February, 2020, the World Health Organization stated, “Don’t attach locations or ethnicity to the disease, this is not a ‘Wuhan Virus,’ ‘Chinese Virus’ or ‘Asian Virus.’
The study found out that one fifth or 19.7 percent of the hashtags with #covid19 showed anti-Asian sentiment compared to 50.4 percent of hashtags with #Chinesevirus.
The study also showed that when people tweeted the hashtag #chinesevirus, they also added other racially discriminatory hashtags such as #bateatingchinese, #yellowmanfever, #makethecommiechinesepay, #disgustingchinese, #commieflu, #chopstickchins, and #chinkflu.
The findings came out in the wake of a string of attacks on Asian communities in the US, including the recent series of shootings in Atlanta that left six women of Asian descent dead.
At the start of the pandemic, Trump condemned xenophobic attacks against Asian Americans, but he continued to use these kinds of remarks.
On the night Asian women were killed in multiple shootings in Atlanta, he once again referred to coronavirus as the "China Virus" in an interview with Fox News.
In a report released on Tuesday, March 17, Stop AAPI Hate said nearly 3,800 hate crime incidents were reported against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in 50 states in the US over the last year.