State-level Racially Motivated Hate Crimes Contrast Public Opinion on the #StopAsianHate and #StopAAPIHate Movement

#StopAsianHate and #StopAAPIHate are two of the most commonly used hashtags that represent the current movement to end hate crimes against the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. We conduct a social media study of public opinion on the #StopAsianHate and #StopAAPIHate movement based on 46,058 Twitter users across 30 states in the United States ranging from March 18 to April 11, 2021. The movement attracts more participation from women, younger adults, Asian and Black communities. 51.56% of the Twitter users show direct support, 18.38% are news about antiAsian hate crimes, while 5.43% show a negative attitude towards the movement. Public opinion varies across user characteristics. Furthermore, among the states with most racial bias motivated hate crimes, the negative attitude towards the #StopAsianHate and #StopAAPIHate movement is the weakest. To our best knowledge, this is the first large-scale social media-based study to understand public opinion on the #StopAsianHate and #StopAAPIHate movement. We hope our study can provide insights and promote research on antiAsian hate crimes, and ultimately help address such a serious societal issue for the common benefits of all communities. A recent report found that in 16 of the America’s largest cities, anti-Asian hate crimes have surged around 145% in 20201. On March 16, a series of mass shootings occurred at three spas or massage parlors in the metropolitan area of Atlanta, Georgia, United States2. Six out of eight victims who were killed were Asian women. Since then, many anti-Asian-violence rallies have been held across the world. The discussion and debate around #StopAsianHate and #StopAAPIHate which represent the social movement that aims to end hate crimes against Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, is becoming heated on social media platform like Twitter. Previous studies have investigated social movements like #BlackLivesMatter (Taylor and Whittier 1999; Yang 2016; Freelon, McIlwain, and Clark 2016; Gallagher et al. 2018; Ray et al. 2017), #HeForShe (DiBrito et al. 2019) and #MeToo (Jaffe 2018; Jagsi et al. 2018; Zarkov and Davis 2018; Duong et al. 2020), however, few research are about https://www.csusb. edu/sites/default/files/FACT%20SHEET%20Anti-Asian%20Hate%202020%20rev%203.21. 21.pdf https://www.cnn. com/2021/03/17/us/robert-aaron-longsuspected-shooter/index.html the hate crimes against Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. To fill the gap in understanding the #StopAsianHate and #StopAAPIHate movement, we conduct a social media study of public opinion of 46,058 Twitter users across 30 states in the United States ranging from March 18 to April 11, 2021, and make four major contributions. To summarize, (1) using the publicly available selfdisclosed information of Twitter users, our study analyzes the participation patterns in the movement; (2) based on the content and opinion of the tweets, we classify them into six major topics; (3) by conducting logistic regression, we find that public opinion on the #StopAsianHate and #StopAAPIHate movement varies across user characteristics; (4) we show that the rate of state-level racial bias motivated hate crimes is negatively associated with the proportion of tweets that show a negative attitude towards the movement. To our best knowledge, this is the first large-scale social mediabased study to understand public opinion on the #StopAsianHate and #StopAAPIHate movement. Participation patterns Using the Tweepy API and a list of related keywords and hashtags (see Materials and Methods), we have collected, inferred characteristics of 46,058 unique Twitter users across 30 states in U.S. ranging from March 18 to April 11, 2021, who have discussed the #StopAsianHate and #StopAAPIHate movement, and obtained the number of state-level racial bias motivated hate crimes from Federal Bureau of Investigation (United States Department of Justice 2020), which are listed in Table 1. 55.68% of the study population are women, which is greater than the proportion of women in the general Twitter population. According to the survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, women account for 50% of the Twitter population (Wojcik and Hughes 2019). This suggests that the #StopAsianHate and #StopAAPIHate movement attracts more participation from women, which might be related to collective identity (Polletta and Jasper 2001) that women may join the movement based on shared membership of the victims of recent anti-Asian attacks where six out of eight people killed in Atlanta shootings were Asian women, and so was the victim of the San Franar X iv :2 10 4. 14 53 6v 1 [ cs . S I] 2 9 A pr 2 02 1 Table 1: Descriptive statistics of the Twitter users in this study and the rate of state-level racial bias motivated hate crimes.