Hate speech against Asians, particularly Chinese, in the UK and US in 2020 increased by a whopping 1,662% during the Coronavirus pandemic, a study carried out by Ditch the Label, a UK-based anti-bullying charity organization has revealed.
Ditch the Label partnered with Brandwatch, a UK-based digital consumer intelligence company, for the study and they analyzed more than 263 million posts from different social media platforms that were uploaded between 2019 and mid-2021.
According to the study, social media users made 23 million violent threats to people of Asian ethnicity in the period under study. There was a new post about ethnic or racial hate speech against Asians every 1.7 seconds on average.
Most of the ethnic or racial slurs against Asians did not even exist two years ago before the Coronavirus, which originated from China in December 2019, was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO) in March 2020.
Speaking in this regard, CEO Ditch the Label, Liam Hackett, said that the study shows that online hate speech against Asians, in general, and Chinese, in particular, in the UK has reached an all-time high.
Brandwatch’s Director of Content, Gemma Joyce, termed the findings of the study as ‘horrifying’ and warned that hate speech against Asian people is only going to increase in the absence of robust measures to tackle the problem.
Last year in May, it was reported that hate crimes against Asians, particularly Chinese, between January and March in 2020 increased by a third in comparison to the same period for 2018 and 2019.
Authorities lodged 267 complaints against hate crimes against Asian people all over the UK in the period under study. Most of the victims of the hate crimes were either spat at, punched, or verbally abused in public.
