Facts, reality, honest reporting, these things don’t seem to matter in the New York Times as the ridiculously mentioned “Paper of Record” made a desperate and hideous attempt on Saturday to blame Donald Trump and the Republicans for the use of the term ” China virus. ”
Technology reporter Davey Alba tried to back up the wholly unfounded assumption that the man who killed eight people in Atlanta was motivated by anti-Asian posts online and (100% factual) Republican descriptions of the coronavirus as originating in China.
Here is the headline: “Anti-Asian online posts helped create the conditions for violence in the real world – misinformation spearheaded by the spread of Covid.” But Alba’s attempt to connect dots failed miserably. She certainly couldn’t show how white hatred online led to the massacre.
The [social media] The Telegram group was a sign of how anti-Asian sentiment flared up in the corners of the internet, exacerbating racist and xenophobic tropes, just as attacks against Asian-American citizens have increased. Anti-Asian groups and discussion threads have been increasingly active in messaging apps such as Telegram and in Internet forums such as 4chan since November. Especially on far-right message boards like The Donald, researchers said.
Alba appeared shocked that “people blamed China for the pandemic”. Readers were also offered another annoying lecture on the term “Chinese virus” (“Brazilian variant” is apparently fine.)
The activity follows a surge in anti-Asian misinformation last spring following the coronavirus, the first surfaced in China, began to spread around the world. China has been blamed for the pandemic on Facebook and Twitter. Users posted hashtags like #gobacktochina and #makethecommiechinesepay. Those hashtags went up when former President Donald J. Trump called Covid-19 last year “Chinese Virus “and” Kung Flu “.
Factual Claims About The Virus Are “Asian-American Negative Tropics”?
Negative Asian American tropics have long existed online, but increased in March last year when parts of the United States were locked down due to the coronavirus. This month, politicians like Republican Paul Gosar of Arizona and Republican Kevin McCarthy of California used the terms “Wuhan virus” and “Chinese coronavirus” to refer to Covid-19 in their tweets.
….
The misinformation linking the coronavirus to anti-Asian beliefs has also increased over the past year. According to Zignal Labs, a media literacy company, nearly eight million speeches against Asia have been published online since March last year, many of which are false.
In one example, an April Fox News article that went viral for no reason said the coronavirus was created and deliberately released in a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The article was liked and shared more than a million times on Facebook and retweeted 78,800 times on Twitter. This is based on data from Zignal and CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned tool for analyzing social media.
There is no link to identify the Fox News article, but this was a Fox bullet from mid-April. It says nothing about the virus being “released on purpose”. And the theory that the virus was created in the laboratory for possibly harmless reasons has garnered supporters. Why China, which allowed the virus to spread around the world while incarcerating whistleblowers and then attempting to blame the US military for the virus, is protected from criticism by the Times remains a dirty mystery.
Alba need not have found much violence instigated by “far right” whites – her examples concerned intra-ethnic conflicts (is Dr. Li-Meng Yan really “anti-Asian”?)
But it still flared up occasionally, for example when Dr. Li-Meng Yan, a Hong Kong researcher, made unproven claims last fall that the coronavirus was a bio-weapon developed by China. In the United States, Dr. Yan to a right-wing media sensation. Her appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News Show in September generated at least 8.8 million online views.
Alba’s “anti-Asian” examples sounded more like lame intra-ethnic insults.
During this second surge, calls for violence against Asian Americans became commonplace.
“Filipinos are not Asians, because Asians are smart,” read a post in a Telegram channel that showed a dog holding a gun to his head.
This rude but non-violent line dates back at least to 2009 when it was used in a context that had nothing to do with calling for “violence” against Asians, however defined.
Following the Atlanta shootings, a Facebook screenshot of a suspect’s Facebook post was posted on Facebook and Twitter this week. The post contained a miasm of conspiracies about China embarking on a Covid-19 cover-up and wild theories about how it intended to “secure global domination for the 21st century”.
Is Alba suggesting that China not seek to “secure global domination for the 21st century”?
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