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From Yellow Peril to Model Minority: Asian stereotypes in social media during the COVID-19 pandemic

Published: 30 April 2023 Publication History

Abstract

Heightened racial tensions during the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to the increase and rapid propagation of online hate speech towards Asians. In this work, we study the relationship between the racist narratives and conspiracy theories that emerged related to COVID-19 and historical stereotypes underpinning Asian hate and counter-hate speech on Twitter, in particular the Yellow Peril and model minority tropes. We find that the pandemic catalyzed a broad increase in discourse engaging with racist stereotypes extending beyond COVID-19 specifically. We also find that racist narratives and conspiracy theories which emerged during the pandemic and gained widespread attention were rooted in deeply-embedded Asian stereotypes. In alignment with theories of idea habitat and processing fluency, our work suggests that historical stereotypes provided an environment vulnerable to the racist narratives and conspiracy theories which emerged during the pandemic. Our work offers insight for ongoing and future anti-racist efforts.

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  • (2024)Disposable identities: Solving web trackingJournal of Information Security and Applications10.1016/j.jisa.2024.10382184(103821)Online publication date: Aug-2024

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cover image ACM Conferences
WebSci '23: Proceedings of the 15th ACM Web Science Conference 2023
April 2023
373 pages
ISBN:9798400700897
DOI:10.1145/3578503
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 30 April 2023

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  1. Asian stereotypes
  2. Social media
  3. hate speech
  4. social network

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WebSci '23: 15th ACM Web Science Conference 2023
April 30 - May 1, 2023
TX, Austin, USA

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  • (2024)Disposable identities: Solving web trackingJournal of Information Security and Applications10.1016/j.jisa.2024.10382184(103821)Online publication date: Aug-2024

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