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The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has changed our lives in unprecedentedways. In the face of the projected catastrophic consequences, many countrieshave enacted social distancing measures in an attempt to limit the spread ofthe virus. Under these conditions, the Web has become an indispensable mediumfor information acquisition, communication, and entertainment. At the sametime, unfortunately, the Web is being exploited for the dissemination ofpotentially harmful and disturbing content, such as the spread of conspiracytheories and hateful speech towards specific ethnic groups, in particulartowards Chinese people since COVID-19 is believed to have originated fromChina. In this paper, we make a first attempt to study the emergence ofSinophobic behavior on the Web during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Wecollect two large-scale datasets from Twitter and 4chan's Politically Incorrectboard (/pol/) over a time period of approximately five months and analyze themto investigate whether there is a rise or important differences with regard tothe dissemination of Sinophobic content. We find that COVID-19 indeed drivesthe rise of Sinophobia on the Web and that the dissemination of Sinophobiccontent is a cross-platform phenomenon: it exists on fringe Web communitieslike \dspol, and to a lesser extent on mainstream ones like Twitter. Also,using word embeddings over time, we characterize the evolution and emergence ofnew Sinophobic slurs on both Twitter and /pol/. Finally, we find interestingdifferences in the context in which words related to Chinese people are used onthe Web before and after the COVID-19 outbreak: on Twitter we observe a shifttowards blaming China for the situation, while on /pol/ we find a shift towardsusing more (and new) Sinophobic slurs.

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