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Gianluca Stringhini practically saw this coming. His lab had been studying hate speech and other malicious activity on social media platforms for several years, when they detected a spike last March in the use of words like Chinese and virus.

Stringhini, a BU College of Engineering assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, Chen Ling (ENG24), a PhD candidate in his lab who came to BU from her native Shanghai in 2019, and an international team of researchers from the United States, China, Italy, Germany, Cyprus, and Iran, sifted large-scale data sets from Twitter and the alt-right fringe network 4chans Politically Incorrect board, called /pol/, from November 1, 2019, through March 22, 2020. They reported an explosion of Sinophobiaanti-Chinese slurs, threats, and conspiracy theoriesas the pandemic spread from China to other countries.

Researchers tracked a shift on Twitter to posts blaming China for the pandemic, while on /pol/, known for polarizing hate speech and where people can post anonymously, the shift was toward the use of more and new Sinophobic slurs.

In April 2020, Stringhini and the other researchers issued their findings in a preliminary e-preprint as a call to action, warning that the online anti-Asian rhetoric evolving around the pandemic could possibly lead to hate attacks in the real world and most certainly harm international relations.

Its now a year later, and with the Asian community grieving and fearful over the March 16 shooting deaths of six Asian women in Atlanta, Stringhinis and Lings study appears prescient. They are preparing to present their teams findings at Aprils annual Web Conference, the top academic conference for web-related research.

Hate crimes increased 149 percent for people in the US Asian community from 2019 to 2020, according to preliminary data gathered from 16 major cities by the California State University Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, in a study released this month. The first spike occurred in March and April 2020 amid a rise in COVID cases and negative stereotyping of Asians. The number of Anti-Asian hate crimes reported in Boston went from 6 in 2019 to 14 last year. Hate crimes in the United States decreased 7 percent overall, a decline that could likely be attributed to the pandemic-imposed drop in social interaction in public spaces, according to the study.

BU Today talked in separate conversations with Stringhini and Ling, who brings a background in psychology to her research, about the rise of Sinophobia online.

Q&AWith Gianluca Stringhini and Chen Ling

Gianluca Stringhini: Our results indicate that the explosion of the pandemic corresponded to a rise in Sinophobia on social media. We not only observe an increase in the use of anti-Asian slurs on Twitter and /pol/, but we also see the emergence of new, COVID-inspired slurs. We also find that the word Chinese started being used in similar contexts to the word virus as lockdowns started.

We focused on Twitter and /pol/ to be able to draw comparisons between a general purpose social network and a more polarized and hateful one. We find a clear increase in the occurrence of Sinophobic slurs on /pol/ after the beginning of the pandemic, when the lockdown was announced in Wuhan on January 23, 2020, and it kept increasing as the pandemic started hitting homefor example, when Lombardy started their lockdown in March. We also observe spikes in the use of certain Sinophobic slurs both on /pol/ and Twitter right after notable events, like President Trump referring to COVID-19 as the China virus. Although we didnt measure this, I expect similar trends to hold for other social media services.

Trumps actions definitely had an impact on anti-Asian rhetoric online. Anecdotally, we saw something similar after the Muslim ban. The issue with Trumps account was kind of unique, because Twitter hesitated to enforce its code of conduct on that account until after the Capitol insurrection, and this allowed some of Trumps behaviors that would have not been tolerated in the accounts of other Twitter users to go uncensored.

Generally speaking, the trends on the two platforms show similarities: at first they were considering COVID as a Chinese problem that did not affect the Western world and later shifted to blaming China for the pandemic. However, /pol/ is quite a different community than Twitter, and it is not surprising that they started creating new slurs as time went by.

Stringhini: Online hate emerges in various contexts. One project we are working on is related to COVID misinformation, and as part of that project we are observing several misinformation narratives that we may consider racist, blaming Chinese people for the pandemic and speculating that the virus is an actual bioweapon designed to attack the Western world.I think the online racism that we observe is a symptom of broader problems in our society which manifest with physical violence. The online and offline world are linked. Although it might look like online racism is more widespread because we are more likely to stumble upon it when reading the comment section of news articles, for example, it is actually a problem affecting people in their in-person interactions.

Stringhini: My biggest concern is the rise in physical violence against Asian people. It is unclear how much online hate results in physical violence, but racist rhetoric online for sure helps set the climate for escalations. The killings in Atlanta are a sad example of this escalation.

Stringhini: The two kinds of hate go together: while our study focused on measuring Sinophobic rhetoric in general, it is reasonable to expect that many individuals have been targeted by anti-Asian racism as well. The racist activity that we observed is filled with stereotypes, and while focused on China, it ended up affecting Asian people in general.

Stringhini: I think its a mixture; /pol/ is generally a racist place and casual slurs are commonplace. At the same time, this emergence of Sinophobic rhetoric can be explained by the theory of defensive denial, in which the virus was seen as a problem of China at first, and did not affect the United States. Later, the emerging pandemic was blamed on China, which fueled more racist rhetoric.

I think that conspiracy theories on the fact that the virus was engineered in China go hand in hand with blaming Chinese people for the pandemic.

Chen Ling: When people are anonymous online, theyll say things more emotionally. They use it to express their anger, the fear of the pandemic. In psychology, its called scapegoating. People need to find a scapegoat. They did this to the Chinese even before the pandemic. But COVID-19 was like a trigger. It allows people to express their fear and anger in wordslike a swordand put them online. I think deep down they feel quite vulnerable.

We want to know why people are doing thistheir motivations. People have different coping methods when they are under pressure. There is content moderation on some mainstream platforms, like Twitter, to lead people to a healthier coping method. But on the fringe communities, especially 4chan, people say whatever they want. I believe there are a lot of people who are having a hard time in their lives because of the pandemic, and they transfer it into hate speech, to scapegoating Asians for losing their jobs, maybe, or for not being able to see their families because of social distancing. They find people online to share their fears and anger with.

Stringhini: I think that the administration having a clear anti-racist stance is good, but I doubt that this will have a positive effect on communities that are already hateful and polarized. Online moderation could help.

Stringhini: I think it is important for institutions to take a clear stance against Sinophobia and show support to their members of Asian descent. The goal of our work is mainly to raise awareness about the problem, but more effective online moderation could help curb the problem.I think that each and every one of us must work towards making every member of the BU community welcome. Local support by peers can help in putting casual hate received online into context, and help people deal with it. We also must denounce any sign of racism that we may spot in our community.

Stringhini: My research has always been focused on protecting people online. After witnessing a rise of hate speech in the past years, I decided to focus on ways we can make the Web a safer place for everyone.

I think there is a serious risk for researchers in this space to feel overwhelmed and fall into rabbit holes, and this can have serious effects on their mental health. I think that people working on these kinds of projects should constantly check on each other and talk about particularly disturbing content that they might encounter. Taking breaks is also very important. With my collaborators, we joke that we should take a break every couple of hours to go watch videos of kittens on YouTube, but thats actually very good advice.

I am always concerned about the mental well-being of students working on these topics. We are trying to develop best practices about thisbeing open about problems and talking about it and taking breaks.

Ling: Professor Stringhini makes sure we feel comfortable. I am prepared for this because this is the research I do. I want to know how people think this way instead of that way and what makes them think this way or that way.

There is a social psychology book, The Nature of Prejudice [published in 1954 by Harvard psychologist Gordon Allport, translated by Ling into Mandarin], which was developed from the fact of the victimization of Jews during World War II. It emphasizes the importance of such hate speech research. If we pay no attention to such behavior online, the situation will get worse quickly. And there will be physical attacks in real life.

If we do not prevent this kind of hate speech, things will escalate.

When I was reading those posts on 4chan and Twitter, it was like PTSD. I was in Manhattan in December, 2019, before the pandemic and I was walking to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was cold and windy. There were not many people on the street. This young boy shouted something at me. I dont remember what he said, it was something about I should go back to my country. I was so afraid. I kept walking to the museum.

I still remember that feeling. I never think I will be unwelcome by any people. In Shanghai, I can go anywhere I want. In America, people are always so nice to me. I heard about racism in America, but this was the first time I was confronted by this thing.

Nothing like that has happened to me since then, or in Boston. I dont go out much because of the pandemic. Im afraid of the cold. My parents tell me not to go outside around the time of the presidential election. It was chaotic. And I know these days there are attacks against Asian people. I see it on the news. I know that other minorities in the U.S. have more or less experienced this feeling that I do.

I feel sad about the attacks in Atlanta. I read President Browns letter about it. It is inspiring. Things will get better if we keep working to make our world a better place.

The rest is here:
BU Researchers Warned of Online Surge of Anti-Asian Attacks a Year Ago - BU Today