Racializing COVID-19: Race-Related and Racist Language on Facebook, Pandemic Othering, and Concern About COVID-19

To what extent have social media discussions of health racialized during the COVID-19 pandemic? How has the spread of racialized social media health content influenced attitudes about race and COVID-19? To answer these questions, we collected data on public US Facebook posts from 2019–2020 related to health and health care (n ≃ 9,659,000) and document a rise in race-related and racist language in online discussions directly-related to health during the pandemic. We show a substantive increase in Facebook posts connecting health to race and racism beginning around the announcement of the first declared case of COVID-19 in March 2020. Text analyses reveal that posts with explicitly racist language surrounding blame for COVID-19, discussions of unemployment rates and benefits, as well as immigration were shared more on average than the typical post about health generally. We connect the spread of this language on Facebook to survey responses (n ≃ 231,000) from Nationscape. We show that weekly increases in racist and race-related health language on Facebook are related to declines in concern for COVID-19 and heightened anti-Asian attitudes, especially for racially resentful white Facebook users.