Social media has been a conduit for anti-Asian hate speech throughout the pandemic, with impacts ranging from personal to physical. As the pandemic rages on, Asians worldwide are calling for accountability.
Hostile social media environments only exacerbate anxieties and fears, especially as social media is frequently used in daily life, Su-Jit Lin writes in a personal piece for HuffPost.
“We’re many months into this pandemic, yet I continue to confront a stream of anxiety-inducing trigger statements every time I log onto social media, a sudden feeling of impotence and voicelessness,” Lin said.
“I have the additional burden of apology to shoulder. The responsibility to defend an entire country of people to which, as an ABC (American-born Chinese), I have no more than ancestral kinship,” Lin continued.
The consequences of spreading hate through social media were clearly revealed in France this month, VICE reports. After the country announced its second COVID lockdown, a Twitter call to attack Chinese residents led to dozens of physical assaults on Asian residents.
While social media posts early on in the pandemic were rooted in xenophobia and fear of the ‘other,’ posts now carry a ‘darker and angrier tone,’ Sun-Lay Tan, a Safety for All spokesperson said. Safety for All is a coalition of 46 Asian organizations in France.
“It’s no longer just xenophobia. It’s hate,” Tan said, VICE reports. “Safety has become [Asians’] number one preoccupation lately.”
According to VICE, the Paris prosecutor’s office is investigating the original Twitter post that called for attacks against Chinese residents. The hope, Laetitia Chhiv said, is to hold people responsible.
“We want to send the message that no, you can’t say whatever you want on social media and call for attacks on an entire population for no reason,” Chhiv, the president of the Association of Chinese Youth of France, said.
“The fury on social media is nefarious for society,” Chhiv continued. “All it takes is for one person with bad intentions to stumble on a hateful post and use it to justify their violent behaviour.”
Advocates have also called on social media companies to curb hate speech on their platforms. According to The Verge, Facebook Inc. has been ramping up its efforts to identity and remove posts with hate speech.
According to the company’s latest quarterly report, there are “10 to 11 views of hate speech for every 10,000 views of content.”
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