ABSTRACT
In one of the most egregious examples, a horrendous hate crime that occurred on July 11,2020, an 89-yearold Asian grandmother was set on fire by two men as she was walking outside her home in Brooklyn, New York.3 Despite this clearly violent act, the New York City Police Department remained hesitant to classify this as a hate crime.3 Interestingly, in the same neighborhood, only a week before this incident, antiAsian flyers were posted.3 The findings reported by Hohl et al. further confirm these unsettling trends, demonstrating that online anti-Asian sentiments have been rising, with the peak occurring in March 2020. Nguyen et al. showcased how area-level racist sentiment online has been associated with residential racial prejudice,12 and results from Muller and Schwartz showed the link between racist hashtags and real-world hate crimes.13 Yet, despite strong evidence linking the discussion of hate online with real-world impacts, as further exemplified in the research by Hohl et al., this has been met with lackluster countermeasures and response from public health officials and ultimately has done little to spark the civic action needed to tackle and prevent the perpetuation of online hate head on. Consider other domains, where ample evidence has been provided that sentiment on Twitter is predictive of stock market fluctuations.14 Or consider the real-world consequences of errant tweets from those with influential power such as celebrities-for instance, Kylie Jenner's singular tweet, comprising a mere 18 words (including terms "sooo" and "urg") to illustrate her dissatisfaction with Snapchat. The repercussions of this tweet were extensive, equating to roughly $72 million in loss per word that was used, amounting to a total of $1.3 billion in stock loss for Snapchat.15 In another example, Elon Musk's 2020 tweet commenting that Tesla's stock price was too high resulted in significant losses to the carmaker in excess of $14 billion.16 These examples illustrate the power of words.