Sinophobia, anti-Chinese sentiment, has existed on the Web for a long time. The outbreak of COVID-19 and the extended quarantine has further amplified it. However, we lack a quantitative understanding of the cause of Sinophobia as well as how it evolves over time. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale longitudinal measurement of Sinophobia, between 2016 and 2021, on two mainstream and fringe Web communities. By analyzing 8B posts from Reddit and 206M posts from 4chan's /pol/, we investigate the origins, evolution, and content of Sinophobia. We find that, anti-Chinese content may be evoked by political events not directly related to China, e.g., the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. And during the COVID-19 pandemic, daily usage of Sinophobic slurs has significantly increased even with the hate-speech ban policy. We also show that the semantic meaning of the words "China" and "Chinese" are shifting towards Sinophobic slurs with the rise of COVID-19 and remain the same in the pandemic period. We further use topic modeling to show the topics of Sinophobic discussion are pretty diverse and broad. We find that both Web communities share some common Sinophobic topics like ethnics, economics and commerce, weapons and military, foreign relations, etc. However, compared to 4chan's /pol/, more daily life-related topics including food, game, and stock are found in Reddit. Our finding also reveals that the topics related to COVID-19 and blaming the Chinese government are more prevalent in the pandemic period. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the longest quantitative measurement of Sinophobia.
翻译:反华情绪在网络上已经存在很长时间了。COVID-19的爆发和扩展的隔离进一步放大了它。然而,我们缺乏对中国恐惧症原因及其随时间演变的量化理解。在本文中,我们从2016年至2021年在两个主流和边缘网络社区对中国恐惧症进行了大规模的纵向测量。我们分析了来自Reddit和来自4chan/pol/的206M 的8B 文章,我们调查了中国恐惧症的起源、演变和内容。我们发现,反中国的内容可能被与中国没有直接关系的政治事件所引用,例如美国退出巴黎协议。在COVID-19大流行期间,中国恐惧症的日常使用量量性测量在两个主流和边缘网络社区中显著增加。通过分析,“中国”和“中国”这两个词的语义正在随着COVID-19的上升而向中国恐惧症的表达,在大流行病时期里,而中国反华的内容仍然相同。我们进一步使用“美国退出巴黎协议 ” 和“美国” 的话题来展示了中国的内长期和内核关系, 。我们共同的话题, 以及中国的内核关系 。我们之间的争论 包括了中国的话题, 以及中国的争论 以及中国的争论 。