How COVID-19 has Impacted American Attitudes Toward China: A Study on Twitter

Past research has studied social determinants of attitudes toward foreign countries. Confounded by potential endogeneity biases due to unobserved factors or reverse causality, the causal impact of these factors on public opinion is usually difficult to establish. Using social media data, we leverage the suddenness of the COVID-19 pandemic to examine whether a major global event has causally changed Americans’ views of another country. We collate a database of 297 million posts on the social media platform Twitter about China or COVID-19 up to June 2020, and we take tweeting about COVID-19 as a proxy for an individual’s awareness of COVID-19. Using regression discontinuity and difference-in-difference estimation, we reveal that awareness of COVID-19 causes a sharp rise in anti-China attitudes. Our work has implications for understanding how self-interest affects policy preference and how Americans view foreign countries.