"Go eat a bat, Chang!": On the Emergence of Sinophobic Behavior on Web Communities in the Face of COVID-19

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has changed our lives in unprecedented\nways. In the face of the projected catastrophic consequences, many countries\nhave enacted social distancing measures in an attempt to limit the spread of\nthe virus. Under these conditions, the Web has become an indispensable medium\nfor information acquisition, communication, and entertainment. At the same\ntime, unfortunately, the Web is being exploited for the dissemination of\npotentially harmful and disturbing content, such as the spread of conspiracy\ntheories and hateful speech towards specific ethnic groups, in particular\ntowards Chinese people since COVID-19 is believed to have originated from\nChina. In this paper, we make a first attempt to study the emergence of\nSinophobic behavior on the Web during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. We\ncollect two large-scale datasets from Twitter and 4chan's Politically Incorrect\nboard (/pol/) over a time period of approximately five months and analyze them\nto investigate whether there is a rise or important differences with regard to\nthe dissemination of Sinophobic content. We find that COVID-19 indeed drives\nthe rise of Sinophobia on the Web and that the dissemination of Sinophobic\ncontent is a cross-platform phenomenon: it exists on fringe Web communities\nlike \\dspol, and to a lesser extent on mainstream ones like Twitter. Also,\nusing word embeddings over time, we characterize the evolution and emergence of\nnew Sinophobic slurs on both Twitter and /pol/. Finally, we find interesting\ndifferences in the context in which words related to Chinese people are used on\nthe Web before and after the COVID-19 outbreak: on Twitter we observe a shift\ntowards blaming China for the situation, while on /pol/ we find a shift towards\nusing more (and new) Sinophobic slurs.\n