We have repeatedly heard a claim that the term "Chinese virus" is not just offensive but incites anti-Asian hate crimes.
Now we have a study, Association of “#covid19” Versus “#chinesevirus” With Anti-Asian Sentiments on Twitter: March 9–23, 2020 | AJPH | Vol. Issue, that reports that from Mar 9 to Mar 23 (the weeks before and after Trump tweeted: "The United States will be powerfully supporting those industries, like Airlines and others, that are particularly affected by the Chinese Virus. We will be stronger than ever before!"), 19.7% of those who used the hashtag #covid19 had "anti-Asian sentiment" vs 50.4% of those who used the hashtag #chinesevirus and concludes that the former is less "stigmatising".
Ironically the crowd who usually crow that "correlation is not causation" don't say that when they like the findings. Indeed, if you dig into the methodology of this paper, it raises more questions than it answers.
For one, there is the issue of what is considered "anti-Asian". If you read the paper, you can see that hashtags such as #makethecommiechinesepay and #commieflu were coded as "anti-Asian". As is usual with this kind of grievance mongering, criticism of the Chinese Communist Party is conflated with racism against Chinese/Asian people, which is very dishonest.
You can also see that hashtags that "supported restrictions on Asian immigration" were coded as "anti-Asian". Ironically, border controls have been a key tool in the fight against covid. Australia has been praised for its "success" against covid. Yet, Australia banned the entry of foreign nationals who had been in Mainland China on 1 February 2020, and South Korea on 5 March, only closing its borders to all non-residents (regardless of country of origin) on 20 March. So presumably Australia was "anti-Asian" for most of the period this study is about.
Other coding of "anti-Asian" hashtags can also be questioned. "#bateatingchinese" was deemed "anti-Asian". But if you truly believed that covid came about because a human got infected when eating a bat, does using this hashtag really mean you are "anti-Asian"?
Unfortunately, the exact coding of the hashtags is not available, nor is the breakdown of which "anti-Asian" hashtags (or even which types of "anti-Asian" hashtags) were used by each group of hashtag users during each period.
The study also does not qualify the kind of tweets involved. Tweets from an organisation talking about how to protect yourself from covid are going to be different from tweets by individuals about their getting covid, which in turn are going to be different from tweets about how China covered up covid. It is reasonable to expect that tweets using "#chinesevirus" are going to be about different subjects than those using "#covid19". And for all we know, tweets from #covid19-using individuals talking about how their loved ones had died of covid had more "anti-Asian" hashtags than similar tweets from #chinesevirus-using individuals.
But even if we take the study at face value, there is also an interesting complication visible in TABLE 2—Comparison of Hashtags #covid19 Versus #chinesevirus on Twitter Before and After 18:51:00 on March 16, 2020: before Trump tweeted the term "Chinese virus", in the #chinesevirus group there were 495 hashtags per day, of which 305 (61%) were "anti-Asian". But after Trump tweeted it, there were 96,737 hashtags per day, of which 51,085 (53%) were "anti-Asian". So while it seems Trump did popularise the use of the term "Chinese virus", he actually reduced the "anti-Asian" prejudice of its users.
Since the paper fits the narrative, though, these questions will likely never be answered, and the paper's conclusions will be taken at face value to further support the narrative.
