Abstract
The outbreak of COVID-19 has transformed societies across the world as
governments tackle the health, economic and social costs of the pandemic. It
has also raised concerns about the spread of hateful language and prejudice
online, especially hostility directed against East Asia. In this paper we
report on the creation of a classifier that detects and categorizes social
media posts from Twitter into four classes: Hostility against East Asia,
Criticism of East Asia, Meta-discussions of East Asian prejudice and a neutral
class. The classifier achieves an F1 score of 0.83 across all four classes. We
provide our final model (coded in Python), as well as a new 20,000 tweet
training dataset used to make the classifier, two analyses of hashtags
associated with East Asian prejudice and the annotation codebook. The
classifier can be implemented by other researchers, assisting with both online
content moderation processes and further research into the dynamics, prevalence
and impact of East Asian prejudice online during this global pandemic.