Can Social Media Rhetoric Incite Hate Incidents? Evidence from Trump's "Chinese Virus" Tweets

Andy Cao, Jason Lindo and Jiee Zhong

No 30588, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We investigate whether Donald Trump's "Chinese Virus" tweets contributed to the rise of anti-Asian incidents. We find that the number of incidents spiked following Trump’s initial “Chinese Virus” tweets and the subsequent dramatic rise in internet search activity for the phrase. Difference-in-differences and event-study analyses leveraging spatial variation indicate that this spike in anti-Asian incidents was significantly more pronounced in counties that supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election relative to those that supported Hillary Clinton. We estimate that anti-Asian incidents spiked by 4000 percent in Trump-supporting counties, over and above the spike observed in Clinton-supporting counties.

JEL-codes: H0 I18 J15 K0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-10
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Published as Andy Cao & Jason M. Lindo & Jiee Zhong, 2023. "Can social media rhetoric incite hate incidents? Evidence from Trump's “Chinese Virus” tweets," Journal of Urban Economics, vol 137.

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Journal Article: Can social media rhetoric incite hate incidents? Evidence from Trump's “Chinese Virus” tweets (2023)
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