How Much Hate with #china? A Preliminary Analysis on China-related Hateful Tweets Two Years After the Covid Pandemic Began

TL;DR

This study analyzes the prevalence and evolution of China-related hate speech on Twitter during 2020 and 2021, revealing a higher hate rate than average and providing insights into its temporal dynamics and common keywords.

Contribution

It introduces a large, automatically labeled dataset of anti-China hate speech on Twitter using advanced language models and analyzes its development over two years.

Findings

Hate speech rate in #china tweets was 2.5% in 2020 and 1.9% in 2021

Hate speech rate is significantly higher than the Twitter average of 0.6%

Identified key terms associated with hate speech for further social science research

Abstract

Following the outbreak of a global pandemic, online content is filled with hate speech. Donald Trump's ''Chinese Virus'' tweet shifted the blame for the spread of the Covid-19 virus to China and the Chinese people, which triggered a new round of anti-China hate both online and offline. This research intends to examine China-related hate speech on Twitter during the two years following the burst of the pandemic (2020 and 2021). Through Twitter's API, in total 2,172,333 tweets hashtagged #china posted during the time were collected. By employing multiple state-of-the-art pretrained language models for hate speech detection, we identify a wide range of hate of various types, resulting in an automatically labeled anti-China hate speech dataset. We identify a hateful rate in #china tweets of 2.5% in 2020 and 1.9% in 2021. This is well above the average rate of online hate speech on Twitter at 0.6% identified in Gao et al., 2017. We further analyzed the longitudinal development of #china tweets and those identified as hateful in 2020 and 2021 through visualizing the daily number and hate rate over the two years. Our keyword analysis of hate speech in #china tweets reveals the most frequently mentioned terms in the hateful #china tweets, which can be used for further social science studies.