In March 2021, the whole world was still suffering from the COVID-19 pandemic, while we all navigated the constant variants, masking, and vaccination. One gunman killed 8 people including 6 Asian females at multiple spa locations in Atlanta GA. While the attacks at the spa locations were committed by one racial and gender motivated shooter, tragic incidents like this one were unfortunately not singled out but were rapidly on the rise. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the AAPI community has suffered from severe racism that includes outright discrimination and violent hate crimes: in 2020 alone, there were nearly 3,800 hate crimes targeting the AAPI community, not accounting for unreported ones due to fear of retaliation or cultural self-esteem. Subsequent to the vigil in New York honoring the Atlanta shooting victims, various activist social media accounts took their rage online to call for immediate change and action, posting moral-framing content to promote user engagement.

Since then, a wave of social justice campaigns called #StopAsianHate went viral. A series of studies have been conducted by Dr. Wang and her collaborators leveraging Twitter data that were publicly available. In one study, Wang et al (2023) used a mixed-methods approach to investigate the anti-Asian hate campaign via the lens of moral and issue-based framing. Examining the narrative of #StopAsianHate on Twitter using computational analysis, the study finds that moral framing using virtue values (e.g., emphasizing the need to care for the most vulnerable) has a positive effect on user engagement (measured by messages receiving likes or retweets) while vice-moral framing (e.g., emphasizing the violation of a moral value) motivates users to distribute information about wrongdoing to raise awareness. They found that issue-based framing by zooming in on specific topics does not really help with user engagement. The implication of this study suggests that community activists should emphasize anti-Asian hate as a common mission for all humanity and call for solidarity among all social groups in their messages, leveraging the power of moral framing to promote public engagement instead of merely calling out wrongdoings and violations.

A couple other papers are currently under review. We will be back for more updates once the papers are in press. But here is one network visualization of our 2021 twitter dataset.