"Go eat a bat, Chang!": On the Emergence of Sinophobic Behavior on Web
Communities in the Face of COVID-19
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04046v2
- Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2021 14:02:52 GMT
- Title: "Go eat a bat, Chang!": On the Emergence of Sinophobic Behavior on Web
Communities in the Face of COVID-19
- Authors: Fatemeh Tahmasbi, Leonard Schild, Chen Ling, Jeremy Blackburn,
Gianluca Stringhini, Yang Zhang, Savvas Zannettou
- Abstract summary: We study the emergence of Sinophobic behavior on the Web during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic.
We find that COVID-19 indeed drives the rise of Sinophobia on the Web.
We characterize the evolution and emergence of new Sinophobic slurs on both Twitter and /pol/.
- Score: 13.321463619748648
- License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
- Abstract: The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has changed our lives in unprecedented
ways. In the face of the projected catastrophic consequences, many countries
have enacted social distancing measures in an attempt to limit the spread of
the virus. Under these conditions, the Web has become an indispensable medium
for information acquisition, communication, and entertainment. At the same
time, unfortunately, the Web is being exploited for the dissemination of
potentially harmful and disturbing content, such as the spread of conspiracy
theories and hateful speech towards specific ethnic groups, in particular
towards Chinese people since COVID-19 is believed to have originated from
China. In this paper, we make a first attempt to study the emergence of
Sinophobic behavior on the Web during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. We
collect two large-scale datasets from Twitter and 4chan's Politically Incorrect
board (/pol/) over a time period of approximately five months and analyze them
to investigate whether there is a rise or important differences with regard to
the dissemination of Sinophobic content. We find that COVID-19 indeed drives
the rise of Sinophobia on the Web and that the dissemination of Sinophobic
content is a cross-platform phenomenon: it exists on fringe Web communities
like \dspol, and to a lesser extent on mainstream ones like Twitter. Also,
using word embeddings over time, we characterize the evolution and emergence of
new Sinophobic slurs on both Twitter and /pol/. Finally, we find interesting
differences in the context in which words related to Chinese people are used on
the Web before and after the COVID-19 outbreak: on Twitter we observe a shift
towards blaming China for the situation, while on /pol/ we find a shift towards
using more (and new) Sinophobic slurs.
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