[On
platforms such as Telegram and 4chan, racist memes and posts about
Asian-Americans have created fear and dehumanization.]
By Davey Alba
Hundreds
of people quickly joined. Many members soon began posting caricatures of Asians
with exaggerated facial features, memes of Asian people eating dog meat and
images of American soldiers inflicting violence during the Vietnam War.
This
week, after a
gunman killed eight people — including six women of Asian descent — at
massage parlors in and near Atlanta, the Telegram channel linked to a poll that
asked, “Appalled by the recent attacks on Asians?” The top answer, with 84
percent of the vote, was that the violence was “justified retaliation for
Covid.”
The
Telegram group was a sign of how anti-Asian sentiment has flared up in corners
of the internet, amplifying racist and xenophobic tropes just as attacks against
Asian-Americans have surged. On messaging apps like Telegram and on internet
forums like 4chan, anti-Asian groups and discussion threads have been
increasingly active since November, especially on far-right message boards such
as The Donald, researchers said.
The
activity follows a rise in anti-Asian misinformation last spring after the
coronavirus, which first
emerged in China, began spreading around the world. On Facebook and
Twitter, people blamed the pandemic on China, with users posting hashtags such
as #gobacktochina and #makethecommiechinesepay. Those hashtags spiked when
former President Donald J. Trump last year called Covid-19 the “Chinese
virus” and “Kung Flu.”
While
some of the online activity tailed off ahead of the November election, its
re-emergence has helped lay the groundwork for real-world actions, researchers
said. The fatal shootings in Atlanta this week, which have led to an outcry
over treatment of Asian-Americans even as the suspect said he was trying to
cure a “sexual addiction,” were preceded by a swell of racially motivated
attacks against Asian-Americans in places like New York and the San Francisco
Bay Area, according to the advocacy group Stop AAPI Hate.
“Surges
in anti-Asian rhetoric online means increased risk of real-world events
targeting that group of people,” said Alex Goldenberg, an analyst at the
Network Contagion Research Institute at Rutgers University, which tracks
misinformation and extremism online.
He
added that the anti-China coronavirus misinformation — including the false
narrative that the Chinese government purposely created Covid-19 as a bioweapon
— had created an atmosphere of fear and invective.
Anti-Asian
speech online has typically not been as overt as anti-Semitic or anti-Black
groups, memes and posts, researchers said. On Facebook and Twitter, posts
expressing anti-Asian sentiments have often been woven into conspiracy theory
groups such as QAnon and in white nationalist and pro-Trump enclaves. Mr.
Goldenberg said forms of hatred against Black people and Jews have deep roots
in extremism in the United States and that the anti-Asian memes and tropes have
been more “opportunistically weaponized.”
But
that does not make the anti-Asian hate speech online less insidious. Melissa
Ryan, chief executive of Card Strategies, a consulting firm that researches
disinformation, said the misinformation and racist speech has led to a
“dehumanization” of certain groups of people and to an increased risk of
violence.
Negative
Asian-American tropes have long existed online but began increasing last March
as parts of the United States went into lockdown over the coronavirus. That
month, politicians including Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona,
and Representative Kevin McCarthy, a Republican of California, used the terms
“Wuhan virus” and “Chinese coronavirus” to refer to Covid-19 in their tweets.
Those
terms then began trending online, according
to a study from the University of California, Berkeley. On the day Mr.
Gosar posted his tweet, usage of the term “Chinese virus” jumped 650 percent on
Twitter; a day later there was an 800 percent increase in their usage in
conservative news articles, the study found.
Mr.
Trump also posted eight times on Twitter last March about the “Chinese virus,”
causing vitriolic reactions. In the replies section of one of his posts, a
Trump supporter responded, “U caused the virus,” directing the comment to an
Asian Twitter user who had cited U.S. death statistics for Covid-19. The Trump
fan added a slur about Asian people.
In
a study this week from the University of California, San Francisco, researchers
who examined 700,000 tweets before and after Mr. Trump’s
March 2020 posts found that people who posted the hashtag #chinesevirus were
more likely to use racist hashtags, including #bateatingchinese.
“There’s
been a lot of discussion that ‘Chinese virus’ isn’t racist and that it can be
used,” said Yulin Hswen, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the
University of California, San Francisco, who conducted the research. But the
term, she said, has turned into “a rallying cry to be able to gather and
galvanize people who have these feelings, as well as normalize racist beliefs.”
Representatives
for Mr. Trump, Mr. McCarthy and Mr. Gosar did not respond to requests for
comment.
Misinformation
linking the coronavirus to anti-Asian beliefs also rose last year. Since last
March, there have been nearly eight million mentions of anti-Asian speech
online, much of it falsehoods, according to Zignal Labs, a media insights firm.
In
one example, a Fox News article from April that went viral baselessly said that
the coronavirus was created in a lab in the Chinese city of Wuhan and
intentionally released. The article was liked and shared more than one million
times on Facebook and retweeted 78,800 times on Twitter, according to data from
Zignal and CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool for analyzing social media.
By
the middle of last year, the misinformation had started subsiding as
election-related commentary increased. The anti-Asian sentiment ended up
migrating to platforms like 4chan and Telegram, researchers said.
But
it still occasionally flared up, such as when Dr.
Li-Meng Yan, a researcher from Hong Kong, made
unproven assertions last fall that the coronavirus was a bioweapon
engineered by China. In the United States, Dr. Yan became a right-wing media
sensation. Her appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show in September has
racked up at least 8.8 million views online.
In
November, anti-Asian speech surged anew. That was when conspiracies about a “new world order” related to
President Biden’s election victory began circulating, said researchers from the
Network Contagion Research Institute. Some posts that went viral painted Mr.
Biden as a puppet of the Chinese Communist Party.
In
December, slurs about Asians and the term “Kung Flu” rose by 65 percent on
websites and apps like Telegram, 4chan and The Donald, compared with the
monthly average mentions from the previous 11 months on the same platforms,
according to the Network Contagion Research Institute. The activity remained
high in January and last month.
During
this second surge, calls for violence against Asian-Americans became
commonplace.
“Filipinos
are not Asians because Asians are smart,” read a post in a Telegram channel
that depicted a dog holding a gun to its head.
After
the shootings in Atlanta, a doctored screenshot of what looked like a Facebook
post from the suspect circulated on Facebook and Twitter this week. The post
featured a miasma of conspiracies about China engaging in a Covid-19 cover-up
and wild theories about how it was planning to “secure global domination for
the 21st century.”
Facebook
and Twitter eventually ruled that the screenshot was fake and blocked it. But
by then, the post had been shared and liked hundreds of times on Twitter and
more than 4,000 times on Facebook.
Ben
Decker and Jacob Silver contributed research.