Can Social Media Rhetoric Incite Hate Incidents? Evidence from Trump's "Chinese Virus" Tweets

Abstract

We gratefully acknowledge Thomas Fujiwara, Karsten Müeller, and Carlo Schwarz for sharing their data on the number of Twitter users across counties, the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center for making available their data on anti-Asian incidents, and Bing He, Caleb Ziems, Sandeep Soni, Naren Ramakrishnan, Diyi Yang, and Srijan Kumar for making available their code and data. We also thank Andrew Barr and Daniel Sturm for their detailed comments. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer-reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications.

The impact of COVID-19 on work from home of ethnic groups in the USA: evidence from time-use data

“…The U.S. witnessed an increase in anti-Asian sentiments and racial scapegoating of this minority group during the pandemic (Cheah et al, 2020;Tessler et al, 2020). Several papers document increasing discrimination manifested through more hate incidents against Asians (Cao et al, 2022) and through the decline in demand for services provided by them (Luca et al, 2022). Evidence also shows that one third of Asian Americans feared threats and physical attacks during the COVID-19 outbreak, and eight in ten believe violence against them increased in the U.S. (Ruiz et al, 2021).…”

“…, 2020). Several papers document increasing discrimination manifested through more hate incidents against Asians (Cao et al. , 2022) and through the decline in demand for services provided by them (Luca et al.…”

Hate in the Time of COVID-19: Racial Crimes Against East Asians

“…Other literature has examined how views toward foreigners or minorities changed during the pandemic (He et al, 2020;Bartoš et al, 2021). In addition, Cao et al (2022) document a rise in anti-Asian hate crime in the US in response to Donald Trump's "China Virus" tweets. 3 Our contribution -We join complementary literature analysing how racial animus against East Asians increased during the COVID-19 pandemic (Dipoppa et al, 2021;Gray and Hansen, 2021;Zhang et al, 2021;Lu and Sheng, 2022).…”

Public Opinion, Racial Bias, and Labor Market Outcomes

“…Müller and Schwarz (forthcoming) show that President Trump's tweets about Islam predict increases in xenophobic tweets by his followers, cable news attention paid to Muslims, and hate crimes on the following days. Furthermore, Cao, Lindo and Zhong (2022) document that the number of anti-Asian incidents spiked following Trump's initial "Chinese Virus" tweets and that this spike was significantly more pronounced in counties that supported him in the 2016 presidential election. Bursztyn et al (2020) suggest that rhetoric affects people's behavior against minorities by facilitating expressions of anti-minority views among the prejudiced and changing the views of the unprejudiced.…”