Exploring incivility and moral foundations toward Asians in English-speaking tweets in hate crime-reporting cities during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

PurposeThis study aims to explore the extent to which Twitter users engaged in uncivil and morally questionable expressions in their comments about specific Asian countries and citizens. The integrated threat theory (ITT) was used to formulate questions surrounding incivility and moral foundations within Twitter discourses related to the COVID-19 pandemic.Design/methodology/approachThe authors collected tweets and retweets posted by English-speaking Twitter users in the United States (US) across the following three phases: (1) initial discovery of COVID-19 in China, (2) high US mortality rate from COVID-19 and (3) the announcement that a vaccine would soon be available in the US.FindingsThe authors found a significant difference in uncivil tweets posted in cities with higher levels of reported hate crimes against Asians than cities with low levels. Lastly, English-speaking Twitter users tended to employ moral virtue words and moral vice words when discussing China and Chinese culture/populations.Research limitations/implicationsThe bags-of-words employed are limited in capturing nuanced and metaphorical terms. In addition, the analysis focused solely on Tweets composed in English and thus did not capture the thoughts and opinions of non-English speakers. Lastly, this study did not address all Asian countries. In this sense, the findings of this study might not be applicable to Tweets about other nations.Practical implicationsGiven that many Twitter users tend to use terms of moral virtue in support of Asians and Asian communities, the authors suggest that non-governmental organization administrators provide morally supportive social media campaigns that encourage users to engage in civil discourse.Social implicationsThese findings have theoretical implications as the frameworks of integrated threats and moral foundations were used to offer group-level explanations for online behavior. Additional research is needed to explore whether these frameworks can be used to explain negativity in other communication environments.Originality/valueThis study expands the findings of prior studies that identified the extent to which Twitter users express hate speech, focusing on general Twitter discourse across three specific periods of the pandemic: degrees of incivility and moral foundations, and comparison of incivility based on the prevalence of reported hate crimes.

Structural pluralism and incivility: comparing patterns of moral foundations and incivility in responses to news posts

“…For example, Watson (2016) found that news media in pluralistic communities tended to critically report the BP oil spill. Kim and his colleagues (2021) found that those who live in complex urban areas (e.g. Chicago, Seattle, New York City) are more likely to often use uncivil terms on Twitter.…”

“…By contrast, since rural community members will have fewer chances to be exposed to conflictual news reports in rural local media, they could be less likely to respond aggressively to news stories. For example, those who live in less pluralistic communities are less likely to post uncivil and immoral words toward others (Kim et al. , 2021).…”

“…3. Quanteda (quantitative analysis of textual data) has been widely used in text mining analysis (Kim et al ., 2021). The current study extracts moral foundation and incivility keywords based on word frequency analysis and generates network matrix datasets for moral vice, moral virtue, and incivility separately.…”

“…This study makes a theoretical contribution to the literature on both incivility research (Coe et al. , 2014; Kim et al. , 2021; Su et al.…”

A Psychometric Investigation of the Hate-Motivated Behavior Checklist

“…Regarding the influencing of the pandemic, in the months after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a public health emergency, a rise in hate speech against Asians was seen on social media platforms such as Twitter (Aratani, 2020). Kim et al (2021) investigated whether higher rates of hate crimes against Asian Americans were related to discriminatory Tweets against the same group. The researchers found that in cities with higher prevalence of hate crimes, individuals tended to post more discriminatory Tweets toward Asian Americans and Asian countries as well.…”