Hate speech against Chinese on Twitter in COVID-19 pandemic: The case of "Chinese Virus"

Human being who, by nature, needs belonging, approval and love; develops communal ties and joins social groups in order to meet these needs. The behavioral and communication codes of the groups trigger conformity and obedience behaviors, which are also a part of human nature. While "us & "them" conflicts in the context of binary oppositions feed the climate of violence; individuals become a part of this conflict and violence with the motive of belonging to the group and being approved. Hate speech,on the other hand, as one of the important outcomes of this violence and conflict, creates atmosphere of intolerance and prepares the ground for hate crimes. The "new" features of the new media, while reinforcing the behavior of conformity and obedience to authority driven by approval and admiration, on the other hand, accelerate the spread of hate speech by creating a new and dynamic space in intergroup conflict. In addition, the difficulty in reaching concrete facts in times of crisis increases compliance with the majority and authority. In novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) epidemic, which is a crisis period, the hate speech for Chinese people on Twitter was examined in this context. First of all, content analysis was applied by MAXQDA program to 1545 tweets that shared between March 17, 2020 – March 27, 2020 with "#Çinvirüsü" hashtag; then four different contents selected from four different categories of hate speech were analyzed with the template of van Dijk's critical discourse analysis adapted to Twitter by Bayraktutan et al. (2013). As a result of the analysis, it was determined that besides the tendency of users to conformance to the agenda and the majority, scapegoating acts of authority figures and high-followed accounts are also effective in the production of hate speech.