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Posted: Feb 26, 2021 7:22 AM CT | Last Updated: February 26
Nico Inocalla says he and his family were discriminated against by a fellow customer at a Regina Costco last week.(Nico Inocalla)
A Filipino-Canadian family was left shaken after being shouted at and discriminated against by a fellow customer in a Regina Costco last week.
Nico Inocalla, his brother and sister-in-law were finishing up their shopping last Thursday when the incident occurred. This man in front of us, he kept on looking at us as if he doesn t want us to be there, said Inocalla. But we ignore it. We just still choose to be there and stay in our own lane. But while we were waiting for a turn, he doesn t stop looking at us, and [then] he started yelling you need to social distance, you need to stay six feet away from us.
(Lara Fominoff/650 CKOM file photo)
Has the COVID-19 pandemic contributed to more racists attacks against Asian people online? That’s what a University of Saskatchewan assistant linguistics professor and his team want to figure out.
Over the next year, Zhi Li and his team, along with the Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission (SHRC), are going to try and figure out what constitutes a racist tweet and where they come from.
They’ll be looking at 80 million tweets that originate in Canada beginning in October 2019 and continuing through to the present time.
“It will be very informative for us to truly understand what has happened in our online communities and see whether we could see some patterns, or whether we could see some relationships between online behaviours and offline behaviours,” he explained.
SASKATOON Researchers from the University of Saskatchewan are studying trends and patterns in racist tweets directed at Asian people. The researchers say since the pandemic began, hate towards Asian communities has risen dramatically. “Because of the origin of COVID, many people blame China. And because many people cannot differentiate between Chinese, Japanese or other Asian people the whole Asian community is affected,” said Hongming Cheng, a sociology professor involved in the project. Cheng, along with computer and linguistic experts, will track about 80 million tweets sent during the pandemic. The team will then identify offensive content and train an algorithm to pinpoint racist posts in the data.