SIGNATURE WORK
CONFERENCE & EXHIBITION 2023

On March 16, 2021, six Asian women were killed in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. Now known as the 2021 Atlanta Spa Shootings, this event sparked widespread attention and discussion about anti-Asian sentiment and ways to support Asians and Asian Americans in the United States on social media platforms such as Twitter. This study seeks to analyze Twitter discourse one week before the Atlanta Spa Shootings through a thematic analysis. Tweets created between January 16, 2021 to March 15, 2021 with the keyword “asian hate crime” were pulled using the Twitter API. Tweets from March 08, 2021 to March 15, 2021 were then thematically analyzed, culminating in two main themes: diversified racial tensions and solidarity in emergence. Findings from these themes include the propagation of potentially harmful, false information that overgeneralizes certain groups and the creation of a supportive community against anti-Asian hate crimes, respectively. The reflection of such sentiment within the data helps understand online discourse around anti-Asian hate crimes leading up to the Atlanta Spa Shootings; similarly the findings from this Signature Work Product may be used to inform further research in related topics.