RUNNING WITH SCISSORS:

I scrapped Twitter for uses of "Wuhan virus" and related terms to figure out how this began. Among verified Twitter accounts, some used geography-based terms in January, but by early February they had all but disappeared.

This is unsurprising. After the World Health Organization (WHO) officially named COVID-19 on February 11, other terms faded, especially misleading terms like "Wuhan flu." As a result, "Wuhan virus" went virtually out of circulation for 45 days of the disease's brief existence.

So what changed on March 9? First, Republican Congressman Paul Gosar announced he was under self-quarantine after interacting with a "Wuhan Virus" patient at the CPAC convention. (Tweet times are in UTC, so Rep. Gosar's Sunday evening tweet is March 9 in these graphs.)

In response, MSNBC's Chris Hayes called the expression "incredibly gross," and he was quickly joined by David Gura and Molly Jong Fast, both of whom called it flatly "racist," each garnering tens of thousands of likes.

The racism proposition turned out to be a powerful "scissors statement." Many on the left found the racism of "Wuhan virus" self-evident, while many on the right found it just as obviously not racist. This culture war skirmish can be seen in the chart below, which plots how many tweets with the geographic terms for COVID-19 also include words like "racist," "bigot," "xenophobic," and "stigmatizing." The orange-coded tweets are talking about the geographic terms, asserting or denying that they're racist, and do not appear in significant numbers until March 9.

Verified users who tweeted "Wuhan virus," "Chinese virus" and similar terms most frequently over the next week include the conservative blog RedState (151 tweets) and Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec (46). RedState's Twitter account had never used one of these terms prior to March 9, and Posobiec had not since February 3.

Usage spiked again after Donald Trump further popularized the term "Chinese virus," tweeting it for the first time on March 16. Trump's tweet has the most likes (325,000) and retweets (72,000) of any tweet to use "Chinese virus" or similar terms. The only tweet even close to this influence is Trump's encore on March 17.

Whether or not anyone saying "Chinese virus" intends it as racist, the term is now used almost exclusively by conservatives who don't mind arguing against commentary that it harms racial minorities.

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