Managing Racism in The Context of COVID-19: How do Twitter users justify using the term Chinese Virus instead of COVID-19 as not racist?

Abstract

There have been increasing incidents of anti-Chinese hate since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, both in the real world and on the internet. This paper investigates how the ambiguous nature of racism is managed on social media in the context of COVID-19 by looking at anti-Chinese prejudice on Twitter using a Discursive Psychology approach. We aimed to fill the gaps of insufficient attention on Asian-related racial discourse and insufficient DP research on anti-Chinese prejudice on Twitter after the COVID-19 outbreak. The research question of “How do Twitter users justify using the term Chinese Virus instead of COVID-19 as not racist?” was formed after manually reviewing all relevant tweets from January 31st, 2020, to January 31st, 2021. Over 400 tweets were retrieved and analysed. Analysis showed that Twitter users present four actions when justifying using CV as not racist: (1) defining and (2) specifying terms, (3) comparing with other diseases, and (4) imputing intentions of others’ claims. The two main patterns are (i.) constructing their own meanings of what specific terms stood for in the debate and (ii.) undermining opposite claims by discrediting either the claims or the speakers. The analysis also found out Twitter users treat racism as it is unambiguous by managing it as definable, specifiable, comparable, and weaponisable, in spite of the ambiguous nature of racism as suggested by previous works. Our study identified that the orientation to the denial of racism and actions in denial in online interactions are consistent with previous interview-based studies. The same conclusion was drawn between Asian and other social groups that the actions in discourse are consistent. This study contributes to future research on terminological controversies from both psychological and linguistic perspectives, spontaneous justifications in online settings, and disease-specific racism.